Carpinteria Basics
- Tap to pay.
- Doesn’t run often.
- Transit app is accurate.
Verdict: Very low frequency is the difficulty.
November 2024
About the System
Carpinteria is covered by Santa Barbara’s transit system. There are more routes in and around Santa Barbara, so if you’re riding it there you might do better than I did.
There’s one bus an hour that goes from Santa Barbara through Carpinteria. It goes down the main road, stops near most of the hotels, and grazes the edge of downtown.
Riding
The bus had live tracking, and I managed to ride it once. It was clean, safe, and efficient.
I tapped to pay my fare. It wasn’t set up for the quick transit type of payment, so I had to double click and use face ID to get the transaction to take. Pretty painless though.
From Amtrak, it was already a 10-15 minute walk to get to the bus stop with my luggage. There was another person at the stop. She was on a first name basis with the driver.
I tried riding two more times, but each time the bus was more than 30 minutes away. And on one occasion it stayed at 30 minutes away for about 10 minutes… not sure why the bus remained stopped for so long. I was a 15-20 minute walk from downtown, so I just walked (found a couple really good coffee spots as a result of walking, so I’ll call that a win).
Carpinteria felt very safe to walk, even around 10pm, and even with poor lighting. I used a flashlight for a bit. For a place that felt very car-heavy, it was reasonably pedestrian friendly.
