At 3 p.m. on a Friday, the Red line bus carries only a few passengers as it circulates through downtown, the University of Missouri campus area and Benton-Stephens neighborhood.

Among them is Mark Ervanian, who rides the bus three or four times a month for grocery shopping and appointments at Ellis Fischel Cancer Center.

Cuts to Columbia’s public transit system will have Ervanian riding an extra bus and spending more time waiting at Wabash Station come June. Ervanian said he can live with the inconvenience, but he’s worried about the reliability of the bus system for people who have no other way to get to work every day.

“I would guess that people who look at the bus and say, ‘there aren’t many people and it’s not cost effective,’ are people who don’t rely on the bus,” Ervanian said. “For those of us who do, it’s a necessity.”

Public transit is a public service, not a profit-making enterprise, Ervanian said.

Fellow rider Roger Jones, who uses the bus when it’s too cold to jump on his motorcycle, agreed and said the city should think of funding the bus system in the same way it views filling potholes and financing the police department.

Cuts and changes down the line

With ridership down, the Columbia City Council approved significant cuts and changes to the Go COMO system in September as part of the 2019 budget.

Starting June 3, the city will save nearly $1 million by eliminating Saturday service and cutting the number of routes and buses running at any one time.

Under the current system, Monday through Friday service includes 12 buses on 10 routes with two dozen full-time drivers. The new system will have six buses running on six routes and 12 full-time drivers working at any one time, according to transit and parking manger Leah Christian.

The lines to be cut serve areas of northeast and southwest Columbia. The Light Green route, which runs on Scott Boulevard and Forum Boulevard, and the Purple route, serving Chapel Hill Road and Fairview Road, will be eliminated along with the Orange route, which covers Paris Road and Mexico Gravel Road, and the Brown route, serving Oakland Gravel Road and Range Line Street.

The more popular Gold route, which goes from Stadium Boulevard to Conley Road via Broadway and Worley Street, and Black route, which goes from Grindstone Parkway to Blue Ridge Road via Providence Road, Range Line Street, College Avenue and Old 63, will each be split into separate routes. While other routes will be extended to cover parts of the old routes, the new system will leave much of southwest and northeast Columbia without the regular bus service it currently has.

When the 2019 budget took effect in October, bus service began ending an hour earlier with all buses making their last stop before 7 p.m.

Christian said she expects the cuts in service to reduce ridership, but she doesn’t know the extent. As June nears, Go COMO will begin doing public outreach to inform riders of the changes, she said.

Riders will also see the return of a hub-and-spoke system that the city abandoned in 2014. All buses will now run through Wabash Station, 126 N Tenth St., every 45 minutes. The change will allow riders to transfer buses more easily, Christian said.

Respondents to a 2016 survey by Nebraska-based Olsson Associates favored the change back to and hub-and-spoke system, Christian said. Bus driver Andrew Larm said he was also in favor of the change because it would allow him and other drivers to switch at the end of shifts in a heated, central location.

The changes also mean less time behind the wheel for Larm, who said he often works 65 hours a week, including 25 hour of mandatory overtime. As a student enrolled in night classes at Columbia College, the 22-year-old Larm said he enjoys the extra money in his paycheck from the overtime but that it would be refreshing to have more time off.

Larm and his fellow drivers were assured they would still be scheduled for at least 40 hours a week after the cuts take effect, he said.

Finding the funding

Christian presented the new system to the council at its work session last Monday, without a recommendation to restore limited Saturday service. She had planned to include the recommendation, which would maintain all routes on a 90-minute schedule at a price of nearly $150,000 to the city. Representatives of the Finance Department, however, told her there would be no way to fund the plan without cutting from another area of the already tight budget or raising paratransit fares, she said.

The proposal to restore Saturday service is also supported by the Public Transit Advisory Commission, Columbia College professor and commissioner Diane Suhler said. Even though ridership is lower on Saturday, Suhler said the ability to take a bus was still essential for those who had no other means of transportation.

“Cutting Saturday service really makes it impossible for a lot of people to do what they need to do on Saturday or even get to jobs that they still have to go to on Saturday,” Suhler said.

While riding the bus, Fourth Ward Councilman Ian Thomas said he has heard many concerns from other riders about not having a viable way to go anywhere on the weekend.

During a discussion after Christian’s presentation, Thomas and Third Ward Council Karl Skala expressed support for a plan that would divert funding from the airport and street maintenance. The proposal would take 2.5 percent of the Transportation Sales Tax from each of the airport and streets funds and put it into public transit. Doing so would generate about $600,000 annually for Go COMO, according to Thomas’ calculations. The plan was not vocally supported by any other members of the council.

The commission decided to right a letter to council in support of the proposal at its Thursday meeting, Christian said.

Thomas also proposed the creation of a daily parking fee at Columbia Regional Airport during the budgeting process in September with the intent of adding funds to the public transit budget. The plan was shot down by other council members who worried it would drive business away from the airport.

Ridership dilemma

For Isac Williams, the cuts in service will leave him without transportation during his search for employment. The long-time Columbia resident said he rides the bus every day it runs to get around town.

Williams has a disability and does not drive, so when asked what he would do under the diminished system, he said, “I guess I’ll just have to wait longer.”

By shaving money off the public transit budget every few years, Suhler believes the city is digging itself further into a hole. Sharing a philosophy with Thomas, she said public transit can only succeed if it provides a useful option for people who need or want to use it.

“Increasing the funding to the bus system might actually increase [the ridership] at a much more than proportional rate,” Suhler said. “I think the city keeps maybe shooting itself in the foot by decreasing funding and decreasing service, and as they do that, they more than proportionally impact the ridership of the bus system.”

Thomas is hopeful that a groundswell of support for funding public transit will convince other council members to back his proposals during future budget discussions.

“What I see is a lot of growing support for this. You know, sometimes it takes a real threat to something to galvanize more vocal support for it,” Thomas said. “I had a tremendous response from people in the community last September when I was trying to preserve or increase the funding for city transit.”