SLO Essentials
- Use Token Transit app for a $3.25 day pass, or pay $1.50 cash per ride.
- Buses come 1-2 times per hour. Routes aren’t great.
- No live tracking in typical apps. SLO-specific app may have live tracking.
VERDICT: The ride itself is great, but extremely inconvenient to catch.
November 2024
Paying
You can use cash or the Token Transit app to ride. There was no mention of Token Transit anywhere on SLO’s transit website. I found about it onboard the bus. I’ve used it in other cities. It worked all right… I’m not sure if the tap “took”, but the app has an option to show proof of payment to the driver, and she accepted that. I paid cash for my first two rides, and used Token Transit for my third.
Riding
Once on board, the buses themselves are nice, clean, and pretty efficient at getting you there. Note that there are two separate systems. The SLO buses serve the local area, and are numbered 1-4 A-B (e.g. 1A, 3B). Some of them stop running pretty early, but others go at least until 10pm or so.
There are also long-distance buses. Like, 50+ miles to other cities. They have a different numbering system. I didn’t ride any of these.
Lack of Tracking
There was no live bus tracking in the regular apps (Apple Maps, Transit, Google Maps). I was at the mercy of the bus schedules. The buses all begin their routes more or less on time, at what they call a Transit Center but is really just a block of angled bus bays along the sidewalk. The buses did seem to run pretty close to schedule, which I attribute to there not being that much car traffic in the area.
I managed to actually ride the bus three times during my trip. It was fine actually.
About a week after my trip, I learned that SLO’s own local transit app likely has live tracking. I recommend checking that out if you’re in the area.
Frustration to/from Amtrak
Getting from Amtrak to the Madonna Hotel via bus was a fool’s errand. There are two different stops near Amtrak, one right by the tracks, and one a few blocks away, each served by different bus lines. Since there’s no live tracking, you don’t know which bus is coming first, and they’re each once an hour.
I chose one stop, waited 15 minutes, then watched a bus whiz by the other stop in the distance. Then I just walked the 15 minutes to downtown on my own, luggage in tow.
I also walked back to Amtrak at the end of my trip, as the next bus heading that way was about 40 minutes away.