A recent letter to the editor included this gem: “Observations indicate that buses during the day usually have only four or five passengers and sometimes none.”
Really? You spotted a bus with only a handful of passengers and made the determination from this limited perspective that funding to local transit is wasted? My goodness. This is a remarkable observation considering CT has over 36,000 passengers every weekday, with almost 10 million passenger boardings last year alone. The passenger counts increase every year while CT struggles to make ends meet without a comparable increase in funding. Those figures are available to the public. They are not a secret.
Are there empty, out of service deadheading buses heading to the start of their route or just finishing up a route? Sure. Community Transit hasn’t mastered the magic necessary to avoid that yet. But if you want a true measure of how busy local routes are, go stand at Lynnwood Transit Center, or Ash Way Park and Ride, or any number of Transit centers and watch the boardings. Or look at the standing room only commuter coaches headed to or from Seattle and the university. Or ride a Swift coach from end to end. Then we can talk.
Listen, the dedicated people at CT struggle to put out a desperately needed service every single day but they’ve hit a wall where they won’t be able to provide for necessary service growth without additional funding. I have deep respect for their abilities but, as I’ve pointed out, they are not magicians.
Crystal Knight
Marysville
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