The Downtown Shuttle Bus

A few weeks ago, signs began popping up around downtown Amman advertising the launching of a new downtown shuttle bus with a cheap price and fast service.

"Let's go take a ride around downtown for a quarter of a dinar!"

At about the same time, BeAmman put out an article entitled "A Ride Around Downtown" publicizing the shuttle bus and providing further information about the rationale behind the newest new bus line in the heart of the city.

The Balad, or Downtown, is rightly one of the best places to go in Amman. If you want Amman's best kanafeh, people will point you to Habibeh's. For cheap and delicious falafel, Hashem's is always a good option. The Hussein Mosque is one of the city's nicest, and the Roman Amphitheater one of the more beautiful sites. That's kind of a tourist rundown, but the Balad's main function is as a commercial center with everything from inexpensive furniture to clothing, instruments, a bird market, you name it.

From a transportation point of view, the problem is that in addition to its popularity as a commercial and social hub, the Balad serves as one of the primary thoroughfares for traveling from East Amman to West Amman and vice versa. Depending on where you're coming from, if you want to go East-West, and even North-South from central Amman, it can be very difficult to avoid the Balad. The map below shows possible, but time-consuming, alternatives:

In this OpenStreetMap, green signifies major road ways

The only way to avoid the Balad is by driving a substantial way north or south and then doubling back. As a consequence, even as traffic has built up over the years, people still prefer going through the Balad, though the congestion is making the shorter route a costly one in terms of time and traffic. In rush hour, you can easily walk at a faster than the slow crawl of the cars and busses.

It makes sense then that the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) has taken on the task of alleviating traffic in the Balad. From the quantity of design work and signage around downtown Amman, it looks like the GAM has put a substantial amount of effort into this project. There are new signs around Amman showing where the shuttle bus stops:

"Bus Stop. Loading and unloading."

The coolest thing from my interest is the map of the shuttle's route that the Greater Amman Municipality released. Since there's no map of the Amman transit system as a whole to connect this single route to, it's not hugely helpful, but it does allow you to scout out the shuttle's route without having to ask a bus driver in person, which is the usual way of figuring out where a bus goes.

A number of the places have accompanying pictographs that provide a visual representation of the stop. The brown stop second from the right is the Roman Amphitheater and the orange stop to the left of that is the Hussein Mosque, both of which are evident from the pictures alone without needing to reference the names. I don't know if the pictures are there just to add a little flare to the map, or if like many other transit maps it's a way of communicating stops to people who can't read or foreigners who don't know the language. Either way, adds a nice touch to the route map.

While news of the shuttle may have been eclipsed by Jordan's most recent entry into the Guinness Book of World Records:

World's Largest Floating Image from Oct 30, 2014 at the Dead Sea. Source: Jordan Times

I was still certainly feeling some hype for the shuttle bus. I went right for the Roman Amphitheater (might as well put those pictographs to use), and then walked until I saw the parked shuttles.

Three newly painted shuttle busses in the parking lot of the Tourist Station

The pictograph theme continues onto the busses themselves, which does make the bus stand out as something different as it rolls through the Balad. The busses were in the parking lot of مجمع رغدان السياحي, or the Raghadan Tourist Station. I touched on this in an old post, but this area used to be Amman's biggest bus station. A few years ago, the government relocated the Raghadan Bus Station 1.5km down the road. They then renovated the former Bus Station to make it into the Raghadan Tourist Station with an outdoor square and extra parking for people to use before walking into the Balad.

The whole circuit from the Tourist Station to the Muhajireen Intersection and back again took 35 minutes. In that time, there were only five people who rode the bus at any point, myself included. The shuttle is still knew so it may take a while for it to catch on, but I was also wondering about the choice of terminal points for the shuttle. The shuttle's route is very short, extending just from one end of the Balad to the other. While keeping the ride short makes sense if the government wants to meet its goal of frequent service, there may be a trade-off in terms of demand if the bus does not go all the way to the new Bus Station. Currently, the main terminal point for the bus is the Raghadan Tourist Complex. I think there are plans for the Tourist Complex to play a more central role going forward, but when I was there to take the shuttle it was pretty empty:

I would be interested to learn why they didn't connect the shuttle bus to the main Bus Station 1.5km downthe road. That may be the plan moving forward, but currently the shuttle doesn't go that far. A few people even stepped onto the shuttle, but after they asked the driver if it was going to the "Mahatta" or bus station, the driver said no and they jumped back off the bus.

After I had ridden the full loop, I walked twenty minutes from the Tourist Station down the road to the Raghadan Bus Station and snapped this picture:

While the quality of the picture isn't great, it gets the idea across, which is that those are crowds of people waiting for busses at the Raghadan Bus Station, which is why it might make sense to connect the shuttle to this active transportation hub. Like I said, that may be the eventual plan, but it is currently not the case. There is the 254 which runs a similar route from the Mahatta to the Muhajireen and back, so perhaps the idea was that the 254 already covers that route. Unfortnately, the 254 tends to leave more in the range of every 30 minutes or so, and it's often packed when it does leave, so you might think there is room for the shuttle to pick up some of that demand go all the way out to the bus station. The nice thing about busses as opposed to rail lines is that it is possible to amend routes without too much difficulty, and perhaps this is in the works in the coming months.