to downtown. But in the county’s recent comprehensive plan, the bus line has also been defined as a guideline to future development: for maximum efficiency in density, you build on a bus stop. But as the city’s housing crisis ripples across the county, cheaper apartments in the more far-flung areas tend to market much better once they’re located on a bus route: limiting access to transportation for poorer residents and pushing them to areas where car ownership isn’t just more convenient: it’s a necessity. This “transit premium,” according to a 2014 paper by the National Association of Realtors, directly ties access to transportation to an increase in property values. In a largely rural area with a single transportation system’s terminus ending in one, vibrant economic center, the conditions are prime for this transit premium to be tacked on. Recognizing this direct relation between transit and housing, a NYSERDA-funded study was commissioned, tasking staff from Cornell Cooperative Extension’s transit education program, Way2Go Tompkins, and David West of planning firm Randall & West, to examine the Housing/Transit Cost Index countywide, identifying the overall cost of living – including transportation costs – in certain areas. “You have these situations where people live far from mass transit, forcing them to own cars,” Matt Yarrow, Service Development Manager for TCAT said. “And if you have a car, but don’t have the money to fix it and it dies… that person could lose their job. It creates a real difficult cycle for people to get out of. Not all parties, either developers or renters, may be aware that’s a potential issue, especially if they don’t consider the cost of transportation.” There is a paradox of equity built directly into the bus system: that the most expensive places to rent seem to have the best service when, at the onset, they seem to need it least. But therein lies the paradox of income: according to the most recent figures available, just 12 percent of TCAT’s budget is supported by its bus fares while a significant portion – 38 percent – comes from equal contributions from the city, county and Cornell, which foots the lion’s share of that partnership in exchange for its top-notch, roundclock service. Yet, in its public transit role, the system has an obligation to serve as many people as possible in the best way as possible: a constant balancing of demographics from the high volumes of students going block to block versus the low-volume, high mileage money losing routes carrying individuals from their affordable apartment out of town to one of the plentiful jobs based in the City of Ithaca. As a public service, Yarrow said, buses need to be available at a frequency that allows people some degree of flexibility with their lives.
How A Bus Route Is Made
The bus system and how people interact with it is a very personal thing: not one size fits all. So how do you best serve such a broad spectrum of needs, non standard workdays and medical appointments with such a limited, inflexible and rigid structure as a bus schedule? This is where Yarrow comes in. Yarrow acts as the middleman between the public and the machine, balancing the inputs of local opinion with the realities of TCAT’s data and resources, something the organization is constantly striving to improve in order to better optimize the quality of their service. TCAT recently worked with a team of engineering and computer science students from Cornell led by professor Sirietta Simoncini, focusing heavily not only on TCAT’s systems in general but on the rider experience: interacting with riders, taking the bus and building an understanding of the entirety of the bus system through what their professor called “empathy fieldwork.” “It’s like a little way of understanding who is interacting with your design,” Yarrow said. “The problem obviously is in low density areas outside of town, you’re often dealing with a wide number of different schedules. They want to go from place to place at different times. You can’t schedule a trip around one or two people; you have to be looking at where the patterns merge.” Yarrow acknowledges transit might not be the answer for some people, cognizant of the fact that if they try to overreach too much to accomodate everyone, TCAT may dedicate a lot of resources to something that isn’t cost effective. This has often been the argument against increasing local funding for TCAT in government circles over the past few years. TCAT usually requests a high amount during budget season for an increase, but doesn’t always get it said Dan Klein, a member of the Tompkins County Legislature who serves on the TCAT board, in part because of the imbalance between ridership in the urban and rural areas: it may seem like bad economics to fund a large number of trips to back lightly-used, rural ridership. “There’s that visual when you see an empty TCAT bus go by… it feels bad,” Klein said. “I guess everyone’s in favor of public transportation to some extent, but there’s a different line for different people: how much money should we really be putting into it? That’s where the debate seems to be.” The private sector – ridesharing and taxi services – could make up for some of the gap, but they have the likelihood to almost exclusively accommodate highefficiency, high-profit areas far
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from the fringes of the county line and spurring transportation inequity even further. Yet, mass transit is unlikely to step into that position of being the sole form of transit for everyone: it can only do the best it can. “We can’t think about transit as a taxi service,” Yarrow said. “We can expect, if ridership on an inbound bus is strong, you’re providing a valuable service to a hamlet or village.” Filling The Gaps
The solution to issues of f lexibility, Aragón said, comes in a million little solutions. The car is a deviously practical and flexible mode of transportation – as literary giant and Cornell alum E. B. White once noted, “Everything in life is somewhere else and you get there in a car.” But then there are the negative implications: air quality, lack of access for the county’s poorest and efficiency-killing congestion on the local thoroughfares. The common sense solution, he said is to give it all up. To replace the prevalence of the car (it’s too convenient, Aragón says, to ever eliminate completely), Aragón – in line with the county’s 2014 Regional Transportation Strategy – calls for multiple modes of transportation to address realms where the car could feasibly be replaced. But, because our society has been shaped by the car – from suburban sprawl to a centralization of retail and commercial properties no longer democratized throughout the small towns – we continue to rely on them, the structures of our civilization interfering with our lives even when the car no longer seems a viable option. Unfortunately, there seems to be little sign the government seems to be pushing for that future: In 1998, federal funding for transit systems in Tompkins County was about $50 million per year, Aragón said. Today, it’s just $20 million, of which less than $1.4 million goes to the bus system. While traditional infrastructure – like bridges and highways – get the nod for a majority of federal funding from a healthy gas tax subsidy to the federal highway trust fund and, for the past few years, assistance from the general fund to make up for its declining tax revenues, mass transit – especially at the micro level, oftentimes gets slighted. This is an issue of parity in the federal transportation budget dating back to well before the Trump or even the Obama administration: in 2015 highway funding, on average, exceeded transit funding at a ratio of 60-40 at the local level and up to 81-19 at the federal level, according to figures from the Pew Research Group. And, if the proposed 2017 federal budget isn’t severely amended, this disparity is only set to get worse: in line with calls from organizations like the Heritage Foundation,
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the Trump budget calls for a near elimination of federal funding to public transportation, relegating the brunt of mass transit costs to the states in a reformation of the highway trust fund while continuing to subsidize up to 80 percent of the costs of highway construction projects. At the state level, it’s no better. Though 35 percent of TCAT’s funding stream comes from the state, in New York – where a significant amount of state transportation spending is committed to the mass transit systems of New York City – the loss of close to onefifth of its transportation budget could be crushing to rural communities, especially in a state where highway spending upstate is already at-odds with downstate, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Citizen’s Budget Commission. (Though, to the approval of the New York Public Transit Association, this year’s budget sees a slight bump in funding this year.) But the bus system is not a cure-all: there is a multi-modal approach needing to be applied in order to effectively fill all the gaps in the mass transit network. Yet for all the ideas thrown about, the most cost-effective solution to surpassing the limits of mass transit come by leveraging the simplest, most inexpensive resource we have: our own selves, and our willingness to step up where the funding falls short. From the Finger Lakes Ridesharing Coalition – a network of employees at various local businesses who cover each other’s commute each day – to a county-moderated carpooling message board hosted through Zimride, local organizations try and reframe the conversation on the efficiencies of getting from place to place as a group. One of the most effective solutions to the mass transit gap has come within the Ithaca City School District: Through the School Success Transportation Program, advocates have worked to create a system to coordinate a network of carpooling parents, bringing each other and their children to everything from PTA meetings to soccer practice, helping to overcome the loss of community that oftentimes comes hand-inhand with lack of access to transportation. Then again, the bus can lead to the discovery of community. On that same Friday, Shawn Wilson exited the bus from the Southwest Business Park with plans to take the 21 all the way to Trumansburg, where he lived. He’s a sporadic rider, recently without a car after failing the emissions inspection, so for the past several weeks now has been adjusting to life on the bus. “It’s warm out now, so I can wait as long as it takes to catch a bus,” he said, smiling a bit at his predicament. “I’m lucky I guess.” He talked about life in Trumansburg a little bit, discussing the process of learning more about the town his lack of a car kept him in, by no choice of his own. Then the bus pulled up and, abruptly, the conversation ended.
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