BRATTLEBORO — Whether you need to get to work, school, or a medical appointment, transportation is a vital need; for most of us, it's next in line after food, shelter, and clothing.
Connecticut River Transit (CRT) has just made severe cutbacks to a crucial and formerly reliable bus service that hundreds depend on - and that our Town of Brattleboro tax dollars pay for - without informing anyone ahead of time.
This action is irresponsible and unacceptable.
A taste of what has happened:
Commuter routes for 9-to-5 workers no longer exist. The Bee Line formerly arrived downtown from West Brattleboro at regular intervals throughout the morning and afternoon. If you had to be in town at 9 a.m. for work, child care, or an appointment, you could take the bus. Two buses formerly left downtown after 5 p.m. as well.
None of those trips exist anymore; you'll have to arrive downtown at 7:30 for that 9 a.m. appointment, and the last bus leaves Main Street at 4:48 p.m.
New trip times are seemingly random. For people with less conventional hours and irregular schedules, new trip times are even more inconvenient and confusing; the old schedule was frequent and easy to remember, with hourly departure and arrival times throughout the day. The new schedule is irregular and has major service gaps.
Bee Line cuts have apparently been made to offset the cost of new out-of-state trips. Presumably the town did not engage CRT's services so they could transport people to tax-free New Hampshire shopping destinations, yet that is what appears to be happening.
Although CRT spokespeople have claimed that there is actually more service within Brattleboro than there was before, no one there has returned my calls to clarify those claims.
Even if the number of hours on the road has technically increased (doubtful, since Sunday service has been totally eliminated), what actually counts in public transportation is the timing and frequency of trips - not the total number of hours spent driving the bus.
Cuts were not based on ridership. Looking at the new schedule, logistical constraints rather than riders' needs appear to have driven these changes. When services must be curtailed for budgetary reasons, these difficult choices should be made based on ridership data, not on the transit authority's convenience. There's no indication that such data was taken into account, and CRT did not return my calls to explain why.
Communication issues have revealed a staggering level of incompetence. CRT was chosen by the town because its entire focus is managing bus routes, but its handling of this transition is shocking and unacceptable.
CRT has repeatedly insisted that changes were made based on public input and were announced at public meetings, but it's not clear when and where all these meetings took place.
To the media, CRT has continued to characterize the changes as a service increase: this was all about new trips to Hinsdale, and a meeting about that was indeed covered in local news outlets in May 2012.
However, CRT missed dozens of obvious opportunities to warn its loyal and trusting riders of changes before they happened: signs were not posted and still have not been posted at bus shelters and on buses; the company's website still does not alert riders to the changes; schedules at all bus stations and on the website still reflect the old bus times rather than the new ones.
A CRT spokesperson recently told a local reporter that the company would consider “tweaks” to the new schedule. But this is not about tweaks: it's about addressing the absolute basics. Competence. Transparency. Accountability for how CRT spends our tax money.
We deserve better, and it's time the town manager and the Selectboard demanded answers and major changes - not only to the Bee Line schedule itself but also to how CRT conducts its business.