NY Times: Downturn Forces Transit Cuts Even as Ridership Grows

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Downturn Forces Transit Cuts Even as Ridership Grows
By MICHAEL COOPER

Published: February 3, 2009


ST. LOUIS — There are some 2,300 bus stops around St. Louis where the buses will no longer stop at the end of next month, when, despite rising ridership, the cash-strapped transit system plans to lay off a quarter of its workforce and make drastic service cuts to balance its books.

One of the stops scheduled to be cut is in the western suburb of Chesterfield, Mo., just up the road from a bright, cheerful nursing home called the Garden View Care Center. When the bus no longer goes there, roughly half of the center’s kitchen staff and half of its housekeeping staff — people like Laura Buxton, a cook known for her fried chicken who comes in from Illinois, and Danette Nacoste, who commutes two hours each way from her home in South St. Louis to her job in the laundry — will find themselves with no way to get to work.

“They’re going to be stranding a whole lot of people,” said Val Butler, a nurse’s assistant, who said that she feared the prospect of having to seek work elsewhere in a tightening economy if she cannot get to the job she has held for a decade at Garden View. “A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. A lot of people.”

St. Louis may be girding itself for some of the most extreme transit cuts in the nation, but it is hardly alone. Transit systems across the country are raising fares and cutting service even after attracting record numbers of riders last year, when many drivers fled $4-a-gallon gas prices and stop-and-go traffic for seats on buses and trains.

Their problem is that fare-box revenue accounts for only a fifth to a half of the operating revenue of most transit systems — and the sputtering economy has eroded the state and local tax collections that the systems depend on to keep running. Many transit systems are cutting service even as demand is up. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04transit.html?_r=1&hp