Happy New Year 2022!

From the team here on Virtual Transit Center, as well as our discord team: Happy New Year 2022! Hopefully, this year will be even better than the last!

The Good

Although 2021 was considered to be a bad year by most, for The Virtual Transit Center as well as the DashTransit Channel over on YouTube, this was probably the most productive year yet. For Virtual Transit Center, we added the following rosters to the site, with most of them being the single most accurate rosters online to date:

• Baltimore County Circulator “theLoop” of Baltimore County, Maryland
• Capital Area Transit of Harrisburg, PA
• Cecil Transit of Cecil County, Maryland
• DART First State for the entire state of Delaware
• Harford Transit LINK mostly based in Aberdeen, MD
• New York City’s MTA which was the last roster added in 2021
• New Jersey Transit for the entire state of New Jersey
• MTA Maryland of Baltimore, MD
• RIPTA of Rhode Island

Alongside the many updated rosters, the DashTransit channel has explored many new cities such as Allentown, PA, Boston, MA, and Aberdeen, MD. Currently, the DashTransit channel is the only one to feature any decent video of the Harford Transit Link in Aberdeen, MD (hopefully this will change soon).

With all this in mind, this past year did have some downsides…

The Bad

While this year wasn’t bad for Virtual Transit Center, there were some notable losses for both the website and the community. On top of the losses from COVID, we also lost one of the biggest parts of Virtual Transit Center history: The Forums. After about 6 years of hosting our own forum community, it was time to close it down in order to allocate resources to other parts of the site that would better benefit from it. While it was helpful to have the forums around to encourage users to search up their problems and solutions, it was ultimately decided that such a thing did not exactly help, and only slowed down the website as a whole. While the Forums were permanently deleted on October 30th, 2021, our discord server has picked up where the forums left off.

Here’s to a better year!

While 2021 has brought many improvements to the site and our community, here’s to hoping that 2022 will bring even more improvements! Happy New Year 2022!

About the author: Dash

I have been with Virtual Transit Center since it's conception as the "Dash Forums" back in 2008. Since then, I have been writing and doing YouTube side by side, focusing both on Transportation and Gaming. Most of my knowledge comes from SEPTA as I lived in Philadelphia for most of my life. As of 2021, I am on YouTube as DashTransit, Dash5155, and TheDashOfficial.

As for the name DashTransit itself, it actually stems from my YouTube channel.

DashTransit was originally called "njt5329" and the channel was just clips of buses. Mostly SEPTA and NJT. A Fujifilm Finepix was used in this era.

Starting in July 2011, the Canon SX130IS camera became the camera of the channel, bringing HD documentary-style videos much like my buddy (trainman1971) did for DVD for many years past. This is when the channel became known as "Transit Action Series"

In May 2012, the original Canon SX130IS retired, and then all videos were recorded off a mobile phone until eventually uploaded proved too difficult due to hardships IRL

Starting in 2017, I used a Canon SX200IS from Bastranz to reboot the channel that otherwise was dead for a whole year prior.

Between April 19th, 2019, and January 21st, 2021, all videos were recorded by a Canon SX710 HS camera. The channel was renamed DashTransit 4/19/19.