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GREENSBORO - Home care nurse Brittany Jones knows the kind of mass-transit system she'd like to see here: One like she left behind in New York City.

It would run 24 hours a day. It would blanket the region with the same quality service in Greensboro as in Asheboro, Burlington, High Point, Reidsville and Winston-Salem. The same fare structure would apply no matter where she stepped aboard.

And it wouldn't leave her stranded and calling friends for a ride just because she had to work late into the evening.

"If I have a job, I want to get there on time, and then I want to get home when I'm done," said Jones, a Winston-Salem resident who works throughout the Triad and doesn't always have access to a car. "If they ran like New York, you don't have to worry about, 'Do the buses stop at 6 p.m. or 11:30?' "

That kind of metro system is a long way off in the Triad, even though regional transportation leaders are starting to move toward a more comprehensive, coordinated network.

As it is, the Triad's current system is slow, cumbersome and too often late.

Part of the issue is the system's focus on garden-variety buses, which use the same congested roads as the cars they are vying to supplant.

"They are subject to the same vagaries of traffic," which means buses are likeliest late when commuters most want them on time, said Greensboro transportation planner Tyler Meyer.

Greensboro Transit Authority and other transit providers also must deal with the Triad's sprawling suburban landscape, Meyer said: It's one thing to provide timely service to densely populated neighborhoods near South Elm-Eugene Street, but it's another to do it for widely scattered suburban enclaves five or six miles from downtown.

Planners talk about a Triad future that might include light-rail commuter trains or "bus rapid transit," where buses have dedicated lanes on all or parts of their routes.

But those innovations are decades away.

Meanwhile, GTA does not help its on-time performance by scheduling all buses to start their routes together on the hour or half-hour at the J. Douglas Galyon Depot downtown.

When some buses run late, GTA holds the others at The Depot past the departure time, waiting for stragglers to arrive so people on those buses can make transfers smoothly. On a bad day, buses can start out more than five minutes late and eventually get 15 minutes behind if they're fighting rush-hour traffic.

Still, GTA is one of the Triad's more progressive transit systems, investing heavily in new equipment and expanding service - even if that service has room to improve.

By contrast, High Point has not invested in significant improvements to its HiTran service. Its buses stop running at 6:30 p.m. on weekdays, quit even earlier on Saturday and don't run at all on Sunday.

High Point watches its transit pennies closely, said HiTran assistant manager Angela Wynes: "We think it's very unfair to put a service out there, get people used to it and then pull it back because there is no more funding."

A major hole in the regional network is HiTran's failure to serve the fastest-growing segment of its community: the suburbs along Eastchester Drive and out to the Regional Road hub operated by the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation.

Instead, High Point leaves that to PART, the regional agency that is supposed to provide express service between cities and make only limited stops inside them.

PART's bus from High Point to the hub makes so many "local" stops on Eastchester Drive that it frequently runs late and delays other PART buses at the hub, throwing the whole regional system off schedule.

PART recently unveiled a "Seamless Mobility" plan aimed at encouraging more coordination among the region's nine transit agencies. But the differences among those systems are so huge that they aren't talking about changes that would have immediate impact at the bus stop.

The first cooperative move is likely to be a regional call center so commuters would have a central source of route, fare and scheduling information. The plan also suggests consolidating some maintenance operations, equipment purchases and administrative functions.

These are small, cautious steps at a time that some believe is ripe for bolder action. With gas prices putting unprecedented strains on family budgets, even die-hard motorists are willing to consider mass transit, said Brent McKinney, PART's executive director.

"This is the time, right now," McKinney said. "If public transit is ever going to meet the demands of the public, this is the time we have to rise to the occasion and put that service out there."

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com