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Free minibus plan in Nantucket could be a model for RIPTA in Providence
Reprinted with permissions from The Nantucket Current. Photo: Cary Hazlegrove
Editor’s Note: With ridership in Rhode Island the heaviest in Providence, yet most buses riding around considerably empty, a move to smaller transit, or mini-buses, may prove to be a more successful model for the state’s capital city, as well as other routes while ridership is low.
Nantucket Current story by Jason Graziadei
“It will be free to ride the Nantucket Regional Transit Authority’s (NRTA) “Wave” buses this summer thanks to a $410,000 state grant obtained by the island transportation agency.
The “fare-free” pilot program will run for six months – from April through September – and will include all fixed routes and demand-response services offered by the NRTA.
“The hope is that people will try transit, use the bus, and they don’t have to worry about figuring out how to pay for the buses or buying passes,” said NRTA administrator Gary Roberts. “It will be get on the bus, get off the bus, we’ll track the ridership and there will be no charge to anyone.”
The hope, Roberts said, is that going fare-free will not only encourage more people to ride the bus but also allow drivers to complete more of their routes on time by doing away with the sometimes time-consuming nature of fare collection.
“One of the things when I came here that I noticed in the summer, sitting behind the bus stop as people were trying to board – they may be tourists – but they don’t understand how the fare equipment works, if they need cash, an exact fare, and so there’s a lot of waiting for passengers to board the bus,” Roberts said. “Taking away the fare aspect of it, I’m hopeful we can move along the buses and on-time performance will improve, and we can increase ridership if people know they can just hop on the bus and go. We’re hopeful this is a true test to see if fare-free is the way we should go to get people to ride the buses.”
The $410,000 grant comes from the state Department of Transportation’s $15 million “Try Transit” initiative, and the NRTA is one of 15 regional transit authorities across Massachusetts participating in the pilot program.
The NRTA’s current fares range from $2 to $3 per ride, depending upon the route, with seniors able to ride for half-price, and children under 6 allowed to ride for free.
Since fares will be free for six months, Roberts said businesses will not need to buy seasonal passes for their summer staff (more than 700 seasonal passes were sold last year) and the cost of “period passes” for the entire year would be reduced by 50 percent.
The NRTA’s ridership has started to recover from the lows of the pandemic but has still not returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, according to the latest figures Roberts recently presented to the Nantucket Planning & Economic Development Commission. In 2023, ridership was just above 200,000 people.
The NRTA began operating in 1995 and is managed by the administrator, Roberts, and an advisory board (the Nantucket Select Board). Year-round service began in the spring of 2018.
The transit authority currently owns 19 fixed-route and four demand-response vehicles and recently acquired two electric buses that will go into service this summer. The NRTA contracts with a private company, VTS of MA, Inc. to operate its buses and hire its drivers.
The NRTA is funded through a combination of state, local, and federal sources, along with its fare revenue and passes.”
The Nantucket Current is a division of Nantucket Magazine published by First Nantucket Media
JS : It feels like you are trapped in some kind of circular logic of hyper individualism that denies or obscures the need (and reality) of humans in society with each other. OK that’s a lot of ideological or theoretical or theological sounding words. BUT in the real world for example, people form families that cooperate together, and tribes, and cities and the rest. And many learn from religion and many learn from nature itself about the value and morality of looking out for each other. All of this gets obscured when one evaluates everything based on “me” or “my” and we lose the ability to actually work together to solve problems. OK another way to say it might be a question of experience. Ever taken public transportation in Canada? Europe? Asia? etc. ?? My point here is that “socialized transportation (and things like medical care), actually and in most cases far exceeds hyper-individualized societies like the USA where we can’t even build and price housing for all, or anything else. Here’s another way of getting to it JS, research public transportation that used to exist in the USA – including RI. Look at those networks of rail and bus lines and ask, where did they go. What were they replaced with and why. And you’ll discover corporate handprints everywhere that lobbied to dismantle that system (even though it was private), not because it wasn’ t efficient or didn’t improve the quality and freedom for all, but because they found a more profitable way. . . in cheap resources (for them!) of gas and oil. The rest (cough, cough) is now our unfortunate history. Good taxpayer resourced public transportation expands both the individual and collective freedom of all (unless we’re talking about the 1% perhaps).
For me saying that the mini-bus may indeed be a good idea, that was quite a personal attack. Before you addressed the issue, your first sentence accused me of 1.) having a closed (“trapped”) mind; 2.) engaging in a logical fallacy; 3.) of being a hyper-individualist; 4.) a denier of social solidarity; and 5.) an obscurantist. Quite the ad hominem assault before speaking to the issue.
I actually agree with Ms. Thomas that the mini buses have promise. Replace the large, and largely empty buses. User-friendly. Efficient. My objection was to the funding mechanism.
Following your line of reasoning, if the program is so great for the “community” why shouldn’t the residents of Nantucket fund the program? You managed to bring up socialized medicine; housing; evil corporations; and the straw-man “1%” in connection with transportation. Henry Ford and consumer choice changed transportation, not conspiratorial machinations.
My related objection also was simply to calling federally-funded programs “free”. I question whether something that may benefit a local community, such as Nantucket, should be financed with federal taxpayer dollars, rather than locally. There ain’t no free lunch.
Sorry JS. Wasn’t intending on accusing you. . . but was being honest in saying “sounds to me as if. . . ” these are hyper-individualist, etc. etc. arguments. No offense mean, but really. . . are we as people in a democracy unable to make an argument in a column inviting comments. You do so when you assume certain things about our economic system and consumer choice. I am suggesting some of those assumptions are not valid. Catering to this economic system creates rich and poor and distorts human need and possibility.
Your, “There ain’t no free lunch,” is not really an analysis is it? I challenge your history on this. (I am not challenging YOU as a person, and I myself have so, so much to learn. But the history that i do know indicates that your statement “Henry Ford and consumer choice changed transportation, not conspiratorial machinations,” really doesn’t describe why the US dismantled its systems of cheap mass public transportation across the country, and changed its funding priorities to privilege the auto makers. That is a key reason that other developed countries of the world have mass transportation systems so much better than our own. And yes, that is NOT the free market at work, but it IS political lobbying etc., etc. at work to re-define what was “modern” and what was desirable, etc. etc. Yes, a kind of conspiracy more than consumer choice as such. So I challenge that view, yes I do. AS for Nantucket, the best way might be to simply tax the tens of thousands of private jets that land at that little airport, in exchange for free transportation on the ground for that little island. Don’t go taxing those workers who can’t afford to live there!
Hmmm. . . So as taxpayers, in our cars caught in traffic jams and all the rest, already experiencing in our own living rising pollution caused climate change. . . what could be better than investing in and learning from experiments in true (taxpayer sourced on a sliding scale) timely mini-bus transportation that can save thousands in car expenses & get us there on time, expanding our options?
I think the carrot program with mini buses would invest in seeing what the system could do – there really is no need for those large buses, on most routes, too. They would be more user-friendly and efficient.
So the fares for riders will be paid for by people who are not riding the buses. Makes sense. In a politician or bureaucrat’s mind. What’s that you say, “the NRTA is funded through a combination of state, local, and federal sources?” Those sources would be taxpayers. People.
The “sources” are not a ream of money the government printed that day, or a pile of bills sitting in a cardboard box just waiting to be used. It is so easy to repeat the fallacy that the “government” is funding something. No. It is people’s money that the government takes that funds things.
The article notes that the “free” feature runs for 3 months to encourage people to experience riding the bus – in hopes they will continue when the free goes away. After that rides are $2 to $3 per ride – with children under 6 free and seniors free. The summer experiment is paid for by $400+K in a federal grant to Nantucket.
Sorry to say, the money still came from taxpayers. It may all be a good idea (and I don’t think individuals make economic decisions based on temporary freebies), but still, taxpayers are paying. Even worse, if it is “federal” money, it means that non-Massachusetts taxpayers are, in however small a measure, paying for it. Multiply this example by hundreds of thousands of examples of spending money, and you get our national debt.