Airport Transportation Update
In an earlier post I considered the difficulty of getting to the airport in a timely fashion via bus in San Diego. The main problem is that the MTS route 992, the only route that services the airport, simply follows a loop between the airport and downtown, and thus one must go all the way downtown and then back up to the airport if coming from the north. When I wrote the article, I had not actually tried taking the bus the whole way, however, and now I have several times.
It turns out that depending on when one is traveling, taking the bus is not too big of a hassle. Specifically, if one is traveling around rush hour on weekdays the 150 runs every 30 minutes and gets downtown from campus in approximately 40 minutes where you can then catch the 992 (running every 12 minutes) to get to the airport. This is actually all fairly quick and costs just $2.50 without a student bus pass or $2.25 with (for the 992, which is inexplicably not part of the free bus zone). The story is different mid-day or on the weekends. Mid-day the 150 only runs hourly, which can waste a lot of time, and on the weekends it does not run at all, and one has to take the 30, which can take over an hour to get all the way up to campus.
I’ve actually taken to scheduling flights that fit well with the bus schedule and I’ve had good luck getting to and from campus quickly and inexpensively.