Our City Council here in Ypsilanti is being forced to make some very difficult decisions concerning the funding of public services. One of the things that’s apparently on the table, as they look for ways to balance the budget, is local bus service. It seems like a stupid move to me, but it’s not like there’s still a lot of meat left on the bone to whittle away at. Ypsilanti, over the past few years, has pretty much been picked clean… Fortunately, however, up until now, most of us who live here really haven’t had to acknowledge that fact. In the current round of cutting, that’s going to change though. Whether it’s the elimination of bus routes, the laying off of firefighters or the dimming of street lights, we’re all going to start feeling it. “This,” as the advertising campaign promoting a film about Ypsi’s history may one day claim, “is when things got personal.” (I’m picturing Bruce Willis as the gun-toting City Administrator pushed to his limits… And, Iggy Pop would, of course, have a cameo as grandstanding member of City Council.)

I don’t have a solution. I know that ending bus routes is probably the wrong thing to do, but I don’t know where to suggest that cuts be made instead. Some are saying that we should cut the Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Others are suggesting that we go after Eastern Michigan University to start paying their fair share for the city services that they’re using. Those may both be a good things to do, but it’s unclear as to whether either, or even both together, would solve our current problems. (Another school of thought suggests that we stop cutting and instead institute a city-wide income tax.)

I don’t exactly know how all the pieces fit together, but I blame the federal government and their anti-tax jihad. Do you recall how conservative activist Grover Norquist once claimed that he wanted to make government so weak (by draining it of tax revenues) that it could be dragged to a bathtub and drown? Well, I don’t have the evidence to back this up, so take it for what it’s worth, but my sense is that what we’re experiencing are the first stages of death by drowning. The small midwestern city of Ypsilanti, I believe, is just one of the first systems in the body to shut down… The administration cut taxes during a time of war, and, as a result, were less able (and willing) to come to the assistance of the states. The rest, to use a phrase popularized by the Gipper, just trickled down. Sure, some blame probably belongs at the feet of our state administrators, but my sense is that we’d be right to aim higher.

So, we are an extremity in a dying system… Think of Ypsilanti as the black toe of a diabetic in decline.

The responses from the community, as I mentioned above, run the spectrum. I don’t know if it’s exactly what my fellow blogger over on East Cross had in mind, but it sounds to me like he’s saying, “Let’s stop trying to salvage this thing, and let’s just let it fail. Then let’s see how the state responds.” I don’t know that I agree, but I can appreciate what he’s saying (at least what I think he’s saying). Why should we keep postponing the inevitable with our Band-Aid solutions? It’s a question worth considering.

Putting all of that aside, cutting local bus service, is a stupid idea. To not support mass transportation, especially given the issues we face today (such as terrorism and global warming), is absolutely criminal. If the federal government were doing its job, it would be demanding that each and every city aggressively work to promote such initiatives. (There should, in my opinion, be multi-million dollar government awards given to cities that are able to motivate greater percentages of their populations to use mass transit… And an effort should be made to present the use of mass transit as one’s patriotic duty.)

On a purely personal note, I think eliminating local bus service is a bad idea because someone I know, a fellow blogger named Murph, says that doing so may keep him from buying a home in Ypsilanti. Here’s a comment of his left on the Ypsidixit site:

I will note that this has definitely caused plans to buy a home in Ypsi to come to a screeching halt, throw on the hazard lights, and pull out a roadmap.

One of the major things Ypsi had in our consideration over, say, Ferndale or Hamtramck, was AATA – the sister-in-law could live with us and take the bus to work at the UM Med Center.

Cutting AATA service, especially *entirely* is one of the absolute worst things Ypsi could do right now. I suggest everybody complain a lot.

I expect that our plan will be to express shock and dismay, and then continue on as planned, possibly arriving in Ypsi in April, but this is definitely a bad bad thing to hear.

I hope this doesn’t go to his head, but Murph, a professional city planner by trade, is exactly the kind of person we should be looking to attract… Instead we spend our limited resources putting up signs around town proclaiming Ypsilanti a “Cool City,” as though that alone would attract young professionals. (I need to send Murph a note and ask him, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t those banners that were responsible for his interest in setteling here.)

And here, as long as we’re talking about Murph, is an idea that he’s suggested for saving our local bus routes.

What if we were to convince AATA to increase fares by $0.25 for routes #3, #4, #5, #6 and for the routes within Ypsi (10, 11, 20, 33)? $170,000/year is less than 700,000 rides at a quarter a ride. AATA’s press release on 2005 ridership (pdf) says that #4 had 180,000 trips last year, so 700,000 among these seems perfectly reasonable.

Paying an extra $0.25/ride is much much better than having no service whatsoever, and there are ways the sting might be reduced: Many people would have go!passes or UM ids, and only pay a quarter a ride, which is dirt cheap – and maybe the A2 DDA and UM could be convinced to raise their contributions to cover this quarter. Businesses outside of downtown that find bus riders important as either customers or employees could be given the chance to buy $1.25 tokens and provide them to employees for $1 each.

Sounds worth considering, right?

And here, for a different perspective, is a clip from our friend Brett’s post on the subject:

…Which brings me back to the bus service situation, as nearly everyone I ride the bus with is black and pretty clearly not rich. When I first moved here, I thought it was patently absurd for Ypsilanti to build their main library several miles away from the population. The only silver lining was that, indeed, there were a few times each day that one could take a bus there. Just a year or so after it was opened, though, that bus line became one of the first to be cut, to be followed now by all the remaining lines by 2008. I must confess that I’m having a hard time even wrapping my brain around this situation, it makes me so furious, and I apologize for the resulting incoherence in this post. My first thought was actually “Good, maybe if there’s no bus service, then the ‘Service Class’ in Ann Arbor, many of whom can’t afford to live there themselves and instead reside in Ypsi, will be forced to quit their jobs, leaving a lot of silver spoons dangling out of wealthy mouths and nobody to wipe up after them…

Who knows what will happen? If it’s not the busses, it’ll be something else. Our city is failing and we need to come to grips with that fact.

Regardless of where you come down on the issue, it’s probably worth your while to read through the conversations that are taking place on the subject at Maproom Systems and Ypsidixit… You might also want to sign the Save Our Bus petition.

And, just because it wouldn’t seem right not to do so, I thought that I’d mention that, beginning in 1891, there was an interurban streetcar running between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. Scrapped in 1925 in favor of newer, more glamorous “motor coaches,” it doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me now. (The image above shows the tracks of the interurban as they were recently discovered outside the former Martha Washington Theater (presently an all-nude strip club).)