Downsizing RIPTA (continued)

RIPTA OFFICIALS DEVISED what they maintain is an objective ranking system in deciding which offerings might be sidelined.

Each route was analyzed according to several measures: how many passengers are counted per trip, passengers-per-hour, and finally, passengers-per-mile. The routes were ranked best to worst within each of those categories, and those three rankings were added together for a composite rating of 142 weekday and Saturday and Sunday runs.

For example, the Number 8 from Providence to Warwick is ranked 123 on the entire list of 142 bus runs. The Number 8 averages 8.43 passengers per trip, giving it a rank of 89 in that category. Its per-mile rank is 122, and the per-hour rank is 118. Added together, the Jefferson Boulevard bus has a final score of 329, which put it in 123rd place.

By contrast, RIPTA’s top-ranked route — the Number 11-Broad Street bus — had a low composite score.

That route goes from Kennedy Plaza, passing Central and Classical high schools and St. Joseph’s Hospital, to the Providence-Cranston line 75 times a day. It averages 26.94 passengers per trip, which makes it number one in that category, and it’s number two in the per-mile and per-hour categories, for a score of five.

To produce $1,950,000 in net savings (after fare losses, unemployment, and health severance payments to laid-off workers), RIPTA counted backward from the worst rated score until it assembled enough routes to achieve the goal.

Logical or not, the idea of eliminating a bus line that passes some of the state’s major businesses strikes the workers riding to their jobs as absurd.

Marcia Andrade, one her way to work as a customer service representative at a Citizens Bank operations center on Jefferson Boulevard, noted that other businesses on the route — including United Parcel Service, Kenney Manufacturing, and Leviton Manufacturing — make the bus run a natural candidate for mass transit.

Indeed, a reporter counted 18 passengers on one early morning bus and 15 on another, although just two on a third.

"I was having a good day until you came along," jewelry worker Madeline Coelho told me after I delivered news of the prospective cuts. As she climbed aboard the Number 8, she vowed to launch a complaining e-mail to RIPTA.

ONE OF THE PROPOSED cuts that will be rough for both riders and mass transit visionaries is the trolley or "Link" service inaugurated in 1999.

The trolley idea was conceived as part of the Providence Place shopping mall project, says planner Therrien, connecting the "old" downtown with the vast shopping complex near the State House, and received three years of federal funding under the federal Congestion Mitigation Air Quality (CMAQ) program. The federal money purchased trolley look-a-likes, with varnished wood trim and seats, along with brass poles and leather straps for standees. For air quality purposes, the buses run on compressed natural gas.

Kinch, the RIPTA deputy GM, terms the trolleys "an absolute win." Therrien says that with a ridership count of 730,000, about 20 percent of riders are tourists, 30 percent regular RIPTA riders, and the rest are those "who never use the regular system." Further, experts worried about downtown’s high parking costs and traffic congestion see the trolley system as a vital urban service.

But the trolley routes have been put on the death list because they overlap regular bus service. Thus, eliminating the trolleys would not strand workers the way that other cuts might. (The trolley vehicles would be redeployed to surviving runs.)

One of the RIPTA board members skeptical of the trolley system is Robert D. Batting, a former president of Kenney Manufacturing, and a one-time executive at Textron and Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing. Batting notes the trolleys’ high cost, about $350,000, compared with the $285,000 price of a regular bus. And Batting says he’s been told that with advances in diesel fuel and technology, regular buses can run as cleanly as the natural gas trolleys, which, he adds, don’t operate well in the snow.

"How is running an empty trolley helping pollution or the environment or the taxpayer?" Batting asks. Actually, according to RIPTA’s efficiency rankings, the trolleys do pretty well. The weekday Green Line averages 13.52 passengers per trip, making it 30th most efficient among the 142 runs analyzed.

Even some transit advocates, however, agree that elimination of the trolleys should be considered.

Barry Schiller, who oversees transportation issues for the Sierra Club environmental group, says the trolleys are expensive, overlap with other service, and that regular buses in the downtown "short zone" cost just 50 cents a ride, compared to $1 for the trolleys. That said, Schiller is not advocating more than "judicious" overall RIPTA cuts, because, he says, chopping away at the system creates a downward spiral: "You have to be careful, because once you don’t have fulltime bus service, riders give up."

Schiller opposed Batting’s Senate confirmation last April, after the businessman was nominated to the board by Carcieri. Schiller was quoted in the Providence Journal as charging that Batting had "no vision" for building a first-rate transit system and seemed more interested in budget-trimming. More recently, Schiller tells the Phoenix he was concerned at the time that Carcieri wanted Batting to be RIPTA’s chairman, a position Schiller felt should be one of enthusiastic transit advocacy. But Schiller says Batting’s hardheaded business approach warrants a place on the board. Echoing one of Billing’s themes, Schiller says, "Environmentalists see no advantage in running empty buses."