Keep the Coverage. Add the Frequency.

Good evening Mayor, Councilmembers,

My name is Gino, and I run Better Together Transportation.

The transit vote was pulled from tonight’s agenda, but it will come back. Before it does, I want to address several questions Council raised last month.

Councilwoman Turner asked the central question:

Why does a city need transit?

Transit gives people choices in how they live their lives. One of those people was Noelle, a little girl about three years old who lived at Transformation Village.

We drove her, her baby brother, and her mother out to the Arboretum one day. She got to run around outside and explore the gardens. When I picked them up, her mother told me, “I didn’t realize how small my world had become until I stepped outside it.”

Transportation makes the world bigger for families like Noelle’s. Taking it away shrinks their world.

That’s what the Draft Network put at risk.

It tried to improve frequency by redistributing the service Asheville already has. Some riders would go from thirty minutes to fifteen. Others would go from a bus to no bus.

Council recognized that problem. You spent much of the last meeting trying to find another way to serve these riders.

Staff is now examining the Growth Network and how to fund it.

But until Asheville adds capacity, we are still working with the same buses, drivers, and service hours.

You raised microtransit, Mountain Mobility, and partnerships as ways to preserve service. I looked at what each could actually deliver.

As you move forward, here are three mistakes we cannot make.

First: If you know what you’re taking away, you should know what you expect in return.

Your consultant can tell you how many more jobs someone could reach by bus. But the report itself says these measurements are not forecasts, and when Council asked for a forecast, your consultant declined to give one.

There’s reason to question how much of that job access becomes ridership. The City’s 2024 Affordable Housing Plan says more than 75 percent of people who work in Asheville live outside the city.

A job may be reachable by bus. That doesn’t mean the worker filling it can get there.

Second: Do not confuse smaller vehicles with more capacity.

Microtransit may be useful. But a smaller vehicle still needs a driver.

According to ART’s 2018 federal report, labor accounted for 74 percent of its operating expenses. On-demand service can be even more labor-intensive: the ART Choices report says it can require more driver effort for each passenger.

Transit makes more sense when you look at driver-hours, not vans.

Third: Do not replace existing service with promises.

Mountain Mobility was raised as a way to help people losing their routes.

In March of this year, it reported 12 vacancies. By June, 15. Driver turnover went from 2.6 percent in January to 7.9 percent by June.

Last week we got a call. A woman and her husband, who lives with dementia, were scheduled to attend a support meeting together. Mountain Mobility called them and cancelled their trip, citing a lack of drivers.

Another woman called us. She’d waited nearly three hours after her appointment and thought she’d been abandoned at the doctor’s office. Mountain Mobility gave her the same reason: a lack of drivers.

So how do we put more weight on a safety net that is already tearing apart?

Then there are possibilities: MAHEC might run a shuttle. An employer might fund a route. A grant might come through.

Those may become solutions. But they are not replacement service until the ride exists.

If another service is going to replace the bus, put that service on the road first. Then remove the bus.
Councilwoman Roney reminded us of something your consultant said: when cities cut routes, “they don’t normally come back.”

Thirty-one businesses originally supported more frequent service. After they saw the cuts, eleven withdrew.

The public has told you what it wants.

Keep the coverage. Add the frequency.

The Growth Network should be the goal.

Your consultant drew that network, but it requires 60 percent more resources.

So the problem before you isn’t really the map. It’s how we pay for it.

If Asheville cannot yet afford both frequency and coverage, protect coverage until it can.

Mayor Manheimer said last month, “In the future, if we’re gonna grow as a city in a way that makes any sense, we’re gonna have to figure out how to change how we’re doing business.”

You are right. If Asheville is going to grow, its transit system has to grow with it.

You also identified a way to pay for it: a quarter-cent transit referendum. The County controls whether it reaches the ballot, and you said you were “willing to go to the mat for this.”

Ask the County Commissioners to join you.

A countywide transit tax would bring new money to both ART and Mountain Mobility. Rather than one strained system rescuing the other, strengthen both.

Instead of asking, “Who loses service?” ask, “Are we willing to build more?”

Mayor Manheimer also raised the objection voters will make: “Why should I support this? I don’t ride the bus.”

Because you don’t have to ride the bus to care what happens to Noelle and her family.

We’ve already seen what this community does when people see each other’s needs. Helene showed us that.

In Atlanta, I rode a MARTA train. It was a rail line that crossed miles of the city in minutes.

Getting MARTA funded wasn’t easy. Atlanta’s first funding referendum failed.

But its leaders reworked the proposal. Rather than cut one part of transit to build another, they asked the public to fund a larger system: better buses and rail together.

Voters agreed to tax themselves to build it all.

More than fifty years after that vote, I rode a train that exists because Atlanta’s leaders asked their community to build something bigger.

Now put the question to the people: “Will you make the world bigger for your neighbors and for your children?”