Bus

Stella Richards believes she has solved the problem of having to wait for the No. 77 bus at the Old Court Metro Station. She simply gets there 10 minutes after the bus is scheduled to leave."

The Maryland Transit Administration's mid-day, late-night and Saturday bus service between Columbia and Silver Spring will discontinue June 1 -- despite objections from riders about the absence of a public hearing on the decision."

Stacey Chambers has always been on the move. As a child, her nickname was Go Go, because she rarely slowed down. So it comes as little surprise that Chambers, 31, would wind up running a fashion boutique out of a bus. Chambers runs Go Go's Retread Threads (the name borrowed from her childhood moniker) out of a bus from the early '90s she's named Elsa, parking at farmers' markets, at festivals and on neighborhood streets to sell vintage clothes. Chambers started the business in 2010 after she heard a National Public Radio story about how small businesses run out of traditional storefronts were struggling.

A man charged with stealing an MTA bus from a Baltimore garage and leading police on a wild chase into Virginia was angry with family and a transit officer who arrested him last year, police said yesterday.Dewane Edward Rickman "was mad at some people," said Virginia State Police Lt. M. G. Millner, who supervised part of the 80-mile chase Tuesday night. "Part of it was domestic and part of it had to do with a police encounter in Baltimore."Millner would not elaborate on the domestic problem.

A Halloween-themed tour of Baltimore was scarier than expected for a group of tourists Saturday morning.Eight visitors on an excursion sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution were in a bus parked near the Edgar Allan Poe house in West Baltimore when two armed teen-age boys -- one wearing a fluorescent green mask -- boarded the bus and robbed them."

The state Mass Transit Administration has postponed cutting six bus routes between Columbia and Silver Spring until the agency can distribute surveys to every rider who uses the service.The date for discontinuing midday, late-night and Saturday bus service -- contracted to Eyre Bus Service Inc. in Glenelg -- has been delayed from Sunday to June 23, said Nancy Philips, an MTA spokeswoman."That gives commuters time to look at alternatives," she said. "And it gives us more time to absorb what [riders]

Severna Park riders and others who have lobbied to keep the No. 210 bus, which goes from Annapolis to Baltimore, have a year to recruit 100 daily passengers for the line.The Mass Transit Administration agreed several months ago to retain the line and reinstate evening trips that had been cut.But this week, the MTA announced a ridership goal for the No. 210 that must be met to make the line cost-efficient, said MTA spokeswoman Dianna Rosborough."When the decision to retain the No. 210 was made, the line was losing money," she said.

Maryland Transit Administration police have charged a 22-year-old Baltimore man in connection with the detonation of a homemade bomb on a city bus earlier this month, documents show. Alan Weeks, of the 5900 block of Radecke Ave., turned himself in Saturday after television stations broadcast closed-circuit surveillance footage of two men who were on the bus moments before the bomb went off, according to charging documents. Weeks said he was one of the men in the surveillance footage but denied any involvement in the incident.

The manager of the Baltimore Greyhound bus station was misidentified in a caption and article yesterday in The Sun. He is Stanley Stith.The Sun regrets the errors.As they sat in the plastic bucket-like chairs, waiting stoicly for their ride to a small town in Kentucky or to the casinos in Atlantic City, Greyhound bus riders in Baltimore shrugged off news of the bus company's latest financial detour.What mattered more were their own finances and their own routes: the change left in their pockets after paying as little as $11 for a one-way ticket to New York, and whether their bus would leave the West Fayette Street station on time.

Bus and subway ridership in metropolitan Baltimore dropped 6 percent during the first four months of this year, contributing to a "disturbing" decline since last July, transportation officials say."We feel it's probably attributable to the general decline in the economy in the Baltimore metropolitan area," says James O'Donnell, accounting director of the state Mass Transit Administration. "If people aren't working, they can't take as many rides on the bus."Bus ridership fell from 29.3 million in the period from January through April of 1990 to 27.6 million during the same four months of this year, according to figures supplied by the MTA. Metro ridership dropped from 4.5 million to 4.2 million.