LONGMONT — About 60 clearly unhappy bus users packed into a Senior Center meeting room Wednesday evening to complain about the latest service cuts and route changes the Regional Transportation District is proposing for routes inside Longmont as well as several routes carrying passengers to and from Boulder and Denver.
“I use the RTD to get to work every day,” said Melissa Ferguson. “How am going to get home if I can’t catch the bus? I depend on it. I’ve got no way to get around anywhere without the RTD.”
Ferguson was one of more than 30 people who spoke at the RTD’s Longmont hearing on about $12 million in systemwide service reductions transit agency officials have said are needed to help balance the RTD’s 2012 operating budget.
Fay Reynolds, a member of Longmont’s Senior Citizens Advisory Board who spent nine years on the city’s Transportation Advisory Board, said she’s been battling with RTD officials about service issues for more than 25 years and that “dealing with them has not gotten better.”
“I just don’t understand how they think they can keep things going by cutting service and raising prices,” she said.
“Fewer buses equals fewer riders,” said Karey Carbaugh, one of founders of Transit Longmont, which he said is “a group of grass-roots riders” who hope to work with the RTD to improve bus service in Longmont.
Carbaugh presented the RTD staffers with petitions he said had already been signed by more than 300 people asking that the agency not proceed with the trip reductions and other changes being considered for routes serving Longmont. Others in Wednesday’s crowd asked to add their signatures, as well.
Geraldine Blanks said there appears to be a vicious circle of cutting service and increasing fares because of low ridership, which then leads to even lower ridership and further fare hikes and service cuts.
“It’s hurting the people here in Longmont,” Blanks said.
Several people suggested the agency should not only not cut service but should also restore some of the routes and bus trips the RTD has trimmed in the past.
Among those urging the RTD to reconsider or hold off on at least some of the service changes being proposed for Longmont and other eastern Boulder County communities were representatives from the city and Boulder County, as well as state Rep. Matt Jones, a Louisville Democrat whose district extends into south Longmont and who’s on the Legislature’s House Transportation Committee.
The timing of Wednesday’s meeting underscored the different needs of various Longmont transit users.
The meeting started at 4 p.m. and ended shortly before 6 to ensure that residents dependent on Longmont’s local bus routes would be able to catch the last bus home under schedules that had been trimmed back in earlier rounds of RTD service changes. Any later, several at the meeting said, and they wouldn’t have been able to get home on the bus.
But a few people who rely on regional or express routes to get back to Longmont from their jobs in Boulder or Denver said that they’d had to rework their normal schedules to get to the hearing.
The RTD staff will report the comments from the Longmont meeting — along with those from more than 20 similar hearings being held throughout the transportation district this month — to the transit agency board. The board is expected to make final decisions about January service changes on Oct. 25.
John Fryar can be reached at 303-684-5211 or jfryar@times-call.com.
