The City of Winston-Salem’s mass transit fund is ‘slowly starving,’ to quote Lt. Guv candidate Dan Besse:

A long-running debate on the Winston-Salem City Council about how to best run and pay for city bus service has new urgency – the mass-transit-tax fund that helps pay for it will soon be out of money.

Council members are considering raising property taxes, increasing motor-vehicle fees, cutting bus routes or increasing fares to help pay for Winston-Salem Transit Authority costs. If the city does nothing, its mass-transit-tax fund will run out of money next fiscal year, officials project.

“It’s clear our transit system hasn’t been given enough to make it work right,” said Council Member Dan Besse. “It’s slowly starving.”

A few things going on here. For starters:

The city’s budget office estimates that raising fares by 10 cents would add $79,000 in revenue but decrease ridership by 77,000 people a year. A 20 cent increase would add $193,000 but decrease ridership by 162,000 a year.

I don’t know how the city came up with those numbers, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that such modest increases in fares would decrease ridership so substantially. Yeah, I know, people who ride the bus generally are poor, but assuming they can’t scrape up two extra dimes for bus fare doesn’t say much about the city’s view of their earning potential. It’s possible the city simply asked bus riders if they’ll keep riding if the fare goes up; riders will naturally say no but will probably keep riding anyway, proud and few that they are.

And leave it to city government to think about expanding a program that’s going broke:

Council Member Wanda Merschel said that the city also needs to examine current bus routes. She said that routes with low ridership may need to be cut or changed.

Art Barnes, the authority’s general manager, said that his agency’s board is not interested in increasing fares or cutting routes. Rather, he said, the board is considering increasing its routes.

Beautiful. Even more beautiful, though, are the readers’ comments at the end of the article, which hit on the very things I’ve been saying for many months about Greensboro’s public transit system:

I’ve seen mass waste also; huge buses with few or no riders burning expensive gas and spewing excess toxins into our air.

…..I have never understood why W-S uses such large buses for so few people.

Pay no attention, however, to the guy who suggested that PART take over Winston-Salem’s bus system.