With little discussion or transparency, Asheville City Council moved this week to end downtown’s fare free transit zone, an important aid for some citizens. That needs to change, and any changes to the zone deserve a full public discussion
Above: The fare free zone in downtown
On Tuesday, after an extremely brief presentation by staff, Asheville City Council adopted its fees and charges for the next fiscal year as part of its annual budgeting process. Unmentioned during that presentation was that those changes included the end of a fare free zone downtown, despite the city’s Transit Committee recently delaying discussion about the fate of that zone pending more public discussion. Council’s vote puts ending that zone into the city budget that staff is drafting, though they could decide to change that and alter or remove that step before the final budget passes this summer.
While our regular Council coverage on Sunday will have more reporting on that step, in this open letter Sabrah n’haRaven, a member of the city’s Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee, criticizes the decision and the way it was done. — D.F.
Dear Mayor and City Council Members,
I’d like to express my extreme dismay at City Council’s decision to eliminate the Asheville bus service’s Fare-Free Zone without appropriate time for public discussion, appropriate investigation of the rider impact, or appropriate evaluation of other options.
When this issue was raised at the April 7 Transit Committee meeting, it appeared to come out of the blue, surprising at least one committee member as well as the few members of the public present (including myself). The committee agreed to table the discussion until next month, in the interest of getting more information and letting riders have a voice in the discussion. There was certainly no indication from staff that the matter had already been settled by the Finance Committee anyway and that Transit’s feedback was irrelevant. So I was even more surprised when the city staffer presenting the Fees & Charges mentioned “minor changes” (plural) to the transit service.
I thought to myself, “No, he can’t mean that. He means some other little-bitty nitty-gritty fee that was approved at some prior meeting I missed. Eliminating the Fare-Free Zone isn’t a ‘minor’ change, they wouldn’t do that without even specifying out loud what the changes are to be.” Alas, there are no power outlets within reach of the spectators at City Council meetings, so I wasn’t able to review the supporting documents ahead of time, and ended up scrambling — unsuccessfully — to try to pull them up on my phone before the Fees & Charges went up for vote.
As Council member [Gordon] Smith himself said, this is not a budget issue — it’s a driver issue. The supporting documents themselves list the financial impact as 0. Why should it be necessary to rush it through to coincide with the budget calendar if there’s no budget impact? Of course, there will be some financial impact. There are signs that will have to be changed or removed, public information that will have to be edited. Negligible expenses, on a city-budget scale, but the same could be said of the new sign-relocation revenue, which was listed as $200. And of course, there will be added income from new fares. The fact that city staff did not give an estimate of the new revenue, but merely listed it as 0, should have been all the clue necessary that this issue had not been properly researched yet.
The truth is, we don’t yet know what the impact — financial or social — will be. At the Transit Committee meeting, city staff were able to give us very few details. We don’t know how many of the Fare-Free riders are tourists who ought to be paying full fare. We don’t know how many of them are very-low-income disabled who can’t reliably afford even the discount pass. We don’t know how many of them are homeless and depend on the Fare-Free Zone to shave off a small fraction of the many miles they must walk in all weather. We don’t know — and we haven’t been allowed the time to find out.
Staff were able to tell us that around 11,000 fare-free rides were recorded last year. That’s roughly 35 a day, and yes, that’s a tiny fraction of the overall ridership. But if you’re one of those 35, this could mean a significant change. It takes me, a pretty brisk walker if it’s not a Bad Leg Day, approximately 45 minutes to walk from one end of the Fare-Free Zone to the other. If your own commute suddenly increased 45 minutes each way, would you dismiss it as a negligible change, not worth discussion? How many citizens does something have to affect before the impact on their lives is considered worth noticing?
I’m not dismissing the impact on drivers’ lives, either; I understand the frustration involved in keeping track of fare-free rides and I do sympathize. But in the end, drivers are paid for their hassle, and is there a job anywhere that doesn’t involve some hassle? I even suggested to [Transit Projects Coordinator] Yuri Koslen — although given the timeline I doubt he’s had time to follow up on it yet — that they look into making the Fare-Free Zone inbound only, a solution that would almost completely remove the problems for drivers while halving the negative impact on riders. So I’m not even against changing the Fare-Free Zone or even possibly eliminating it, after careful consideration of who is actually using it and how we can mitigate the effects of any changes on low-income riders.
But to simply erase it, in such a rushed, sloppy fashion, without giving riders a voice or properly evaluating the impact? It directly contradicts two of the Strategic Operating Plan’s three focus areas. It shows a complete lack of concern for the low-income Ashevillians who depend on the bus to get around. And it makes me wonder what other decisions are being rushed through without proper evaluation simply because the stakeholders weren’t given a heads-up.
I sincerely hope you will do whatever you can to backtrack on this mistake.
Yours in service,
Sabrah n’haRaven
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Sabrah n’haRaven is a local activist and member of the city’s Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee.
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