I met with Mike Fryar last night to learn more about why he was grumbling about Asheville’s new transit management company. First Transit took over operations yesterday with a new general manager.
Fryar said the old general manager, Lonnie Blair, had 35 years of experience with Asheville transit, and he knew the system inside-out. He knew what ridership was and what lines weren’t justified. He would have liked to reduce staffing by four drivers and run the office with two people rather than six. Unfortunately, nobody ever asked him his opinion. Instead, the city keeps contracting with outside firms for transit studies. Fryar said the city was too interested in appearances to care about nuts and bolts.
During last year’s 90-day fare-free program, four bus transmissions were busted at a cost of $6000 each. Blair allegedly told Fryar he couldn’t get enough Lysol to spray all the fleas the homeless people were bringing onboard. Fryar was perhaps most outraged at how Blair and his department director, Cathy Ball, found out only a couple hours before the fact that city buses would be running a special route to shuttle Obama supporters to a rally. Fryar says Yuri Koslen, UNC-Asheville’s transit planner and a member of Asheville’s Transit Board, is calling all the shots.
Fares make up only about 15% of transit revenues. About a third of revenues come from state and federal grants. Fryar noted that UNCA, the Grove Park Inn, and Greenlife grocery store have special arrangements whereby their employees ride for free and the employers get billed at half-price for monthly use. In other words, Fryar notes, the federal government is subsidizing businesses.
According to Fryar, four buses run an hour to UNCA. Only one bus runs per hour to AB Tech. Since 2007, ridership on the buses to UNCA has averaged between one and two persons per trip.
Then there are the personnel issues, including hiring office staff to do nothing, use of nonstandard methods of communicating, for example, terminations, and overall sloppiness in the handing of contracts. First Transit ranked third of three companies responding to the city’s RFP process. Perhaps Blair’s real-world concerns were fogging up too many dreams.
