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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 41: Louisville Bus Cuts
What happens when a city's transit system is staring down a $30 million deficit, putting half its bus routes on the chopping block? Louisville is at a critical turning point, and our latest episode dives deep into the tough choices and creative solutions that could shape its public transit future. Whether you're a local resident, urban planner, or passionate about transit, this episode sheds light on why funding matters and explores the innovative approaches needed to keep Louisville moving forward. Don't miss this essential conversation on the future of mobility in the city.
Doors are closing Public transit. That's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Transit is the rhythm of my life. Louisville, kentucky, may need to cut its transit service in half. How is their transit agency weighing their options and is there any hope to find more funding? All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are diving into a topic that isn't necessarily a happy-go-lucky topic like we normally are. We're talking about some grand transit plan or an expansion that's being worked on. This one actually caught my eye on Twitter. I saw it initially from the transit guy Good follow, good Twitter follow. We'll put a link there if you're interested in public transit sort of stuff. And the tweet essentially said Louisville, kentucky is cutting their bus service in half and I was kind of like damn, that's obviously not ideal anywhere.
Speaker 2:Sounds like a sensationalist headline until you start digging into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean the reality is that they have already had to cut some of their bus service earlier this spring, so it's already running on lower service levels than it was before and further cuts are currently on the way. There is a little bit of hope that we will get into in a little bit, but there's essentially a $30 million budget shortfall. This has all been kind of prolonged a little bit longer than normal. Just the COVID funds that were available helped the transit agency TARC kind of continue to keep service at reasonable levels for a while. But you know where it's 2024 now, as we're recording this, that funding for the most part is gone and they're having to make some really tough decisions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this isn't an uncommon story. I mean, this is a pretty extreme version of the story. You know where you're cutting out so much, but it's not an uncommon story to see in every metro in the US about how transit services are facing budget shortfalls. And this all goes back to one of the episode we'll eventually do about how public transit doesn't have to be profitable. Right, that is not the purpose of public transit, but this is a very clear example of a system that, as we'll get into the way it's funded and other aspects of it, it's a good example of that kind of system that it's a public good that's absolutely needed. But there's this push that it has to be profitable and what are we going to do? And now we're cutting $30 million out of it.
Speaker 1:One thing that was brought up. So the local public radio put out an article. We'll put a link here for folks to see that it kind of explains a little bit of the backstory here with the $30 million budget shortfall and also how TARC has been funded. The funding mechanism hasn't changed since the 1970s. It's like 0.2% of the sales tax or taxable income in Jefferson County coming in. There's been a lot of criticism over the years that that hasn't increased at all in the 40 years, 50 years. Yeah, it's interesting. Personally I haven't been to Louisville before so I'm curious you've been just to give folks a little bit of an idea of what the city is like and then we'll get into the existing transit system and kind of the three main scenarios that are being laid out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been to Louisville a couple times. I have some work up there and it is a really nice city. I mean it sits right on the river. On the other side is Indiana, the city itself. As you kind of wander around it you can tell that it used to be a lot more dense than what it is now. You have a lot of old buildings side by side, wall to wall type of buildings, but a lot of that's been torn down. They have this old passenger rail station that's kind of off to the side of the city. That's just sitting rusted and unused.
Speaker 2:You can tell that there used to be so much more infrastructure when Louisville was a really up and coming and booming city. And this is pretty common with a lot of cities like Louisville in this region of the country, what we call the Rust Belt, these cities that for the last I don't know 100 years now, have really kind of been on a bit of a decline and what you were talking about with the tax revenue not really changing. The population of this area is not growing at a rapid pace. Right, I would say that's probably growing a little bit slower than most metro areas in the country. Between 1970 and today they've only added a little less than 100,000 people, gotcha, and in the same time frame, you look at a city like Austin, which has yeah that's probably an extreme example.
Speaker 1:That's the extreme example on the other side where we've added you, a million people.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, so the city's not really growing at a very fast rate as well, right, um, so let's kind of transition here and and uh, at the end of the episode too, I, I we're gonna kind of break into, uh, how each of these kind of concepts affects different groups of people. So to to the transit agency tarx credit. Um, they, when kind of investigating affects different groups of people. So to the transit agency TARC's credit. They, when, kind of investigating these three different options that we're going to get into, broke down how each of the concepts would affect people who don't have cars, lower income residents and just like residents as a whole. How much coverage are you going to have? So we will get into that.
Speaker 1:But, like it's important to realize, like when we're talking about transit cuts like this, this has real effects on people and generally it is like the most vulnerable people. It's like I said before we started recording, it's like kicking people while they're down. Essentially, you know, a lot of people aren't choosing to live in further out parts of Louisville without a car by choice. There's not good transit options there. You know what I mean. In a lot of cases Now there are parts of the city that we'll get into that. Currently have every 15 minute or better bus service Without living there. We don't have the full context of how reliable that is and if it's actually running on schedule and all that sort of stuff. But I think it's really important to kind of remember that this is like really impacting people's lives in a major way and we'll get into the details there.
Speaker 2:So, looking at Louisville today, it's not the most compact city. It's pretty sprawled and the bus network covers a significant portion of that city, with maybe two or three high frequency lines that are running about every 15 minutes. You have a couple more that run every 20 or 30 minutes, but the vast majority of lines, when we're looking at the map, run at about 60 minutes or more right, and I mean if you've ridden transit at all before relying on a bus that comes every 60 minutes?
Speaker 1:just there's no better way to put it than it sucks like yeah and beyond it, just like not being convenient necessarily, like you know, put yourself in the situation where you miss that bus by a minute. Um, I mean, you're sitting there for an hour waiting for the next one, which for most people isn't feasible or the more likely scenario, something happens to the bus right.
Speaker 1:It breaks down or gets canceled for that particular time slot, totally and like. Those are going to be the routes that, for reasons of frequency, are not going to have that many riders. So if they're going to cancel a bus, it might be that bus. You know what I mean. So it becomes a fairly unreliable system as a whole. And you kind of mentioned this too.
Speaker 1:Most of the routes on this map all funnel into downtown. So if you're heading anywhere besides downtown or out of downtown you have to have a connection there, which makes getting across town pretty difficult. Now, that is not uncommon by any means In most cities across the US, especially ones that don't have a major emphasis on transit. You see this, you know, in other cities actually, even like in Salt Lake City, they have a decent amount of cross town routes. Here in Austin we see a decent amount of cross town routes, but it is harder to justify in a lot of cases, like I think a lot of transit agencies are like this route, you know, doesn't see tons of ridership, but really you have to think of them as kind of like feeders into the main lines or to help people just get to their destinations quicker well, and louisville is also geographically, um, sort of unique too right, it sits on a bend in the river.
Speaker 2:You have indiana on the other side. There is continual city sprawl on the other side into Indiana, but there's not a lot of opportunity to have sort of cross river lines either where you can sort of capitalize on these long distance lines going in either direction. Coming back to downtown it's almost like to get to downtown you sort of have to go out of the way. The bus route is going to funnel you there and then you're going to stop there and then take the next bus line to the other side of town.
Speaker 1:Like geographically speaking, it's not the most centralized or easy city to move around, and that's also why you just see that there are not many routes on the other side of the river, right? Um, uh, yeah, so that that kind of gives you an idea of what the city is working with, and, and you know, we've had the map up on the screen so you can look, look for yourself. We'll put links to all these maps and everything in the description too, so if you want to go and click around on your own, you can Now kind of the more interesting element of this is we've teased it a couple times there are three options, and I'll give an overview of the three options and then we'll kind of dive into each one. So the first two are options that are dealing with the budget constraint, right, so it's, how do we operate a decent system with $30 million less money than we have today?
Speaker 1:And TARC broke it down into two categories. You have the ridership category and you have the coverage category. Now, the ridership category would focus on putting the resources towards the highest ridership lines in the city to make sure that those lines have the best potential service possible, to keep those routes functional and good and have basically every bus that's being used be a full bus, using them to their maximum potential Sort of how can we provide better service to the areas that are going to use these the most often, to our most common customers?
Speaker 1:basically yeah. And then the other side of that coin is the coverage model. The coverage model seeks to continue to cover the widest geographic area possible so that you're not cutting different regions of the city off from transit entirely. However, if you're going to make up that $30 million budget shortfall, you're going to need to run those buses in general much less frequently. So you end up with more buses that maybe ran every half an hour or every 15 minutes, adding more time to that. So you're going to see a lot more buses that come hourly or worse, which is rough, obviously, but you know you're cutting off less people from transit.
Speaker 1:In total, there's a lot to break down in these different things. So let's let's first start off by talking about the kind of ridership model. We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out, please share this with your friends and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there.
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Speaker 2:So we're looking at the ridership concept which, as you said, is where you are focusing services on a smaller geographic area to try to service the most commonly used bus routes. This is where they're going to really shrink the system and so you see a lot of these outward sort of sprawling bus routes that took you 60 minutes or more disappearing and you're really focused on providing more 15 minute service, 30 minute service and-minute service and 60-minute service routes and in a lot of cases where you have every 15-minute service route, they'll go through a very popular corridor through town and when they get to a certain point, sort of every other bus will sort of change its route. So, for bus A, for instance, will continue on down a longer route where the service becomes less frequent. Bus B may do a little loop and come back down the longer route where the service becomes less frequent. Bus B may do a little loop and come back down the popular route. So it's just kind of using this existing route but changing the service model based on where you are along that corridor.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I mean there are obviously pros and cons to this, right. So, the pro being, you can basically every bus on this model is fairly frequent, given this is Louisville, right, like you know. It's not frequent for New York City, obviously, but, like, given where it is, every bus, except for one in this concept, is every 30 minutes or better, and most of them are every 15 minutes. Right, a lot of benefits for people who live in those areas that, like, yes, you know that you're going to continue to be able to rely on using the bus to get to places that the bus covers. Now, that's the issue. So you're able to get less places, right? Um, and and tark, yeah, we'll put some of the information in here and uh, they kind of mapped out like how many more workplaces are available in each of these.
Speaker 1:So the ridership concept in this, it is covering less workplaces overall than the next one we're going to get into, but it's the ones that it does cover. It covers, in a way, that you could rely on it to be at work on time. You know what I mean. Um, the negatives, though, I mean yeah, you're not, you're not hitting, you're cutting a lot of people who might ride transit today out entirely and and there's just nothing left for them there. So, uh, definitely an interesting one to look at and a pretty big contrast to the next one, which is, uh, the coverage concept now, coverage is going to be sort of the opposite of what we saw with the ridership model.
Speaker 2:Coverage is going to be sort of expanding the number of routes over the city, similar to the map that you would see for the existing system, but your ridership or your your frequency of bus lines is going to go down considerably. So less focus on the 15 minute routes, more focus on, you know, making sure more people have access to this transit system, but with routes are going to come every 30 to 60 minutes and like a major concern, just right when you look at this map, is the lack of red lines on the map.
Speaker 1:The red lines here for those of you watching are the every 15 minute or better ones for those of you listening. Uh, the old map had, like the existing map has like five ish, uh, high frequency lines. This coverage concept map really has one. They're gonna say that it's two one here because it looks like it's two that split off from a very short trunk line. But basically what you're doing here is making the entire city rely on every 30 minute, uh or worse, bus frequencies, which is tough. I mean if, again, uh, you know I'm fortunate to, like I don't rely on bus service to get everywhere, but if I had to, man, I mean relying on a bus that comes every 30 minutes would be difficult to do, especially given the situation we've talked about already of a bus gets canceled. There's a delay, whatever it may be, you could be out there waiting for another half an hour. Or if your bus gets canceled, sitting there for an hour just to get a bus to go somewhere, which is rough.
Speaker 2:It's detrimental to somebody who has to be at their job at a very specific time and because you need a reliable system to be able to get from your house to your employer. Uh, in this model, sure it gives you options to get there, but are you going?
Speaker 1:to make it in time, totally, um. A plus to this, though, is that you're not leaving people out, right? So, on the ridership concept, when you compare the two maps back and forth, you see the ridership one really focused in close to downtown on a couple major transit corridors. This coverage one is much more expansive and goes a little bit further out, which is a benefit for feeding more people into the system. But again, if they're being fed into the system with low-frequency service, you can make the argument that it's no good to them anyway. So, um, definitely interesting. But it's not all bad news, though, because, uh, tarq is also proposing a third concept here. Uh, this one, though, I would say, is not dealing with the budget constraint, right. So they're this third option. They're calling the growth concept, um, and the growth concept relies on finding an additional 50 million dollars of funding, which might sound optimistic, but there's, there's options out there. I feel like and and you know, depending not to get too political here depending on how elections go and everything right now um, I could see there being more opportunities to get access to this funding. Moving forward here, and not to mention, too I mean, kentucky is a red state, don't get me wrong, but you do have a Democratic governor. You've got Andy Beshear in there. So you know we're going to present this one and I think that this obviously we're both going to talk about the growth option being the best one, but I don't think it's all bad news in terms of like, is this impossible to do? You know? All right.
Speaker 1:So, taking a look at this map, if you're watching, if you're listening I'll describe here for you you're gonna see the re-emergence of the color red on the map, which is good, which, again, is that every 15 minute or better service. You've got a couple lines that spur out from downtown being maintained from the existing system and even some new ones being added. Something that stuck out to me was I believe it's the 20 on here. Yep, the 20 is a new cross-town route. It's still fairly close in to downtown, but it's a cross-town route that is every 15 minutes or better, which definitely is going to help with some of those connections. You don't necessarily need to go downtown. You can get people more directly from destination to destination versus going way in and out of your way. You also see a lot more blue on the map, which is every 30 minute routes for some of the you know lesser traveled. But again, you know, a 30 minute route. Is it ideal? No, but it's a heck of a lot better than an every 60 minute or more timeframe route.
Speaker 2:I think if you're comparing this to the coverage model, you're still seeing a pretty large footprint. But the focus for the growth model is finding more efficient routes, providing more frequency on those routes and then growing the system out from there, the system out from there Totally. Once you sort of establish these better routes or getting better coverage and you're convincing more people to ride the bus, then you start looking at expanding further out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I kind of want to take a second to talk a little bit about why this concept, I feel like, is so important, and I'm going to refer to an article that we had in here or in our document getting ready for this, just talking about the kind of human element of this. Uh, in the article there's a woman who talks about feeling trapped. Uh, if, if she loses access to bus service, and her story that she shared here was what's normally a 40 minute trip to go grocery shopping. She relies on tarc to get to and from the grocery store. After the spring service cuts takes her two hours now essentially to go grocery shopping.
Speaker 2:She lives about a mile and a half from the closest grocery store, so imagine needing to pick up your dinner and you go to the grocery store and you're coming back with bags in hand, walking back your chicken's thawing out. It's not really possible to live that far from a grocery store and rely on walking there every single day. You need some type of transit service.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I mean so. That's just like one anecdote of the human element. We can find plenty more. But even on the other side of this, in the same article, there's conversations with business owners. Business owners want good transit as well, because it makes it easier for their employees to get to work on time. If you're a business owner and transit is now being cut in your area, you're definitely going to see, number one, having people potentially show up less on time, but number two, just like having less access to a pool of employees. If you're on a major transit line, your pool of employees that you can hire, who can come to work there, becomes much larger. So you know, whether you're looking at this from the personal standpoint or even from an economic standpoint, this model would be a major benefit to folks in general.
Speaker 2:So TARC has done a really good job of comparing each of these sort of concepts and how it will impact different segments of the community. The way they break this out is in a very nice little graph that shows you the impact of the existing network, the ridership concept, the coverage concept and the growth concept and then they separate this out by different categories, such as proximity to residents as a whole, proximity to jobs, proximity to people of color, to neighborhoods in persistent poverty, poverty, things like that.
Speaker 1:so it's a really good breakdown of each of these sort of segments of society absolutely, and it will even categorize them by showing what level of transit service that they'd be having access to. So you'll see here, if you're watching, if you're listening, we'll try to give you some good descriptions. But, uh, you know what percentage of these folks are going to be having access to 15 minute, 30 minute, 45 minute or 60 minute or better frequencies in each of these areas. And it's kind of interesting to kind of scroll through here and see. Obviously, the ridership concept covering less geography is going to have coverage of less people. However, it is still doing a good job of covering the people who already had access to coverage in general of a 30 or 45 minute frequency or better and, in some cases, providing more of them with better frequency, but you are still leaving some folks out. I know it's a little hard to describe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think an easy way to describe it is currently under the existing network. If you're looking at residents in areas of persistent poverty, currently all but 21% of residents in this category have access to some level of bus service. Now, those levels obviously vary. Only about 30% of those actually have really frequent bus service, and then it continues to sort of go down from there. Right on the ridership concept, we grow that from 21% not having access to 38% right not having access. So the ridership concept for you know, people who are in areas of persistent poverty, it leaves more people out. However, the vast majority of people who do have access to these lines, it's actually improving their service.
Speaker 1:Right. And the other thing I'll say too is on the existing network it's roughly 15% of the people who are on there, which is a big chunk of that difference between 38% and 21%. Those people only had access to 60-minute service or worse. So how much are those folks relying on the bus service already where they live versus the folks who had half an hour or better service? That's kind of some interesting.
Speaker 2:That'd be interesting to dig into further if you had all the data but even if we're looking at the coverage concept, which should be including more people, bringing more people into the system, you're still actually losing coverage of some people in these areas. Right it it grows from 21 not having access to uh public transportation to 23, right, not having access. So it's a marginal, but it's still a difference.
Speaker 1:On this same point here, in residents of persistent poverty. When you look at the coverage map versus the existing, in the existing system you're seeing 35% of folks seeing every half an hour to 45-minute level service. It's not the worst, but definitely not the best. Right Under the coverage concept, though. A good chunk of that number of people end up with every hour service instead, which is actually a service decrease for a pretty good sub segment of the people.
Speaker 2:Almost that entire segment that's getting the 30 to 45 minute bus service is now going to get an hour bus service under the coverage plan Right.
Speaker 1:So, while the ridership concept leaves people out, the coverage concept also makes transit worse for more people. So it's an interesting thing to weigh and a difficult decision for TARC to make. For sure, personally, after diving into this and again we've said this a couple times there's a lot of fun stuff to dive into here, so we will provide links. Tarc has done a great job laying out all this information, but when I when I look at this, I mean if you have to make cuts, right, obviously you don't want to have to make cuts, but if you have to make cuts, a ridership concept, whether you're in Louisville or wherever you are across the country, seems to be the one to make the most sense. Like focus your resources on the transit corridors that are already seeing ridership, that are connecting as many people as possible and it's not ideal, but you're going to have to cut out some geographies to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Well, it provides opportunities to work in conjunction with the city. Maybe you have to change zoning on these routes. Maybe there's an opportunity to grow more density with this focus.
Speaker 1:These two concepts have to go hand in hand yeah, we had a it's be coming up in a couple weeks uh, we had a really good conversation with someone from transit forward, which is a local uh, uh non-profit advocacy group, talking about transit, uh, and and he had an interesting line where he's like I thought I was going to be out talking about trains and buses and all this stuff all the time, but he's like half the time I'm talking about housing because it is so important. So, yeah, there's absolutely tons of room for louisville to look at transit oriented development and equitable transit oriented development and all this sort of stuff to really beef up their system. And some of that can help with funding too. I mean, uh, yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2:These things go hand in hand for sure I think we should go to louisville we should test out the bus system and we should do a whiskey tour or bourbon tour of Louisville. And just go place to place, tasting the best bourbons, using only public transit.
Speaker 1:Yes, we could do. It would be like the Miles in Transit did a like hitting all the Dunkin' Donuts on the MBTA in Boston. We could do. How many distilleries can you hit in a day using only public transit? And the episode will slowly get more and more crazy as we drink more and more whiskey throughout the day.
Speaker 1:That would be pretty hilarious actually, yeah, so I mean, let us know what you think of this. We'd love to hear from folks directly in Louisville on this before we kind of wrap things up, though we do have a bit of an announcement. So, as we've been kind of this things up, though we do have a bit of an announcement, so, uh, as we've been kind of, this is our 40th, 45th this will be our 41st 41st episode.
Speaker 1:So we've been doing this for almost a year uh, one week every week straight and we're looking for ways to kind of bring this to new heights, go to more cities. For those of you who are interested in helping to kind of make this happen, we are launching a Patreon along with the podcast. So if you're interested in that, we'll put a link here in the description. We've got a couple of things we're going to be offering. In the beginning it'll be a little bit slower, but we will build these things out as we go, and if you have suggestions for things you'd like to see there, definitely let us know. We're open to them.
Speaker 2:Some of the things that that we plan to add in the patreon. If you, if we have an episode already early, you will get first access to that episode. Yep, we also have a transit tangents discord which we have started, and you will get premier access to the discord as well to chat with us directly, provide suggestions, connect with other transit enthusiasts yeah, and even see like what we have coming down the line.
Speaker 1:I think personally. So right now I have like a little chat with myself for future episodes ideas, where I drop links to interesting things that mostly I'm seeing on twitter and whatnot, um, and I think I'm just gonna move that over to discord email there's no one in there besides chris and I right now, but start moving it over to discord so you guys can start to see some of the stuff that we're thinking about.
Speaker 2:If you have interesting links, you could drop them in there we can announce what cities we're traveling to and if you want to join us or you have good insights in that city, that is the place to provide it.
Speaker 1:Totally. We're also going to start going through, and in the beginning, when we started this, we used to read comments at the ends of the episodes. We are going to start reading comments. It might not be every episode, but every couple of weeks we'll kind of we'll do a comments and stuff. On discord. There's room to do things like Q and A's and all sorts of stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So, if you're interested in that sort of thing and you want to kind of help support the show uh, we do spend a lot of time trying to put all these together so, uh, yeah, it'd be amazing if you could support us. Uh, there'll be different options and ways you can do so. Uh, and if you have questions or need so it might not be set up perfectly you can reach out by email transittangentspod at gmailcom if you have questions, thoughts, issues, anything like that. With all that being said, though, if you haven't left a comment already, please go ahead and do so. If you haven't rated us on your favorite podcast platform subscribed, liked, all those things it would make a big help for us, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, with all that being said, thank you so much for watching today and enjoy the rest of your Transit Engines Tuesday.