Just before the Memphis Area Transit Authority Board voted to cut routes, bus rider Annika Easley urged those board members to ride the buses themselves.
“Y’all need to do better for you, not just for everybody else, but for people with disabilities, for people who do not have cars or who cannot afford cars,” Easley said. “… Give it a try. Ride the buses. Be dependent on the buses.”
Less than a month later, MATA has an entirely new board after Memphis Mayor Paul Young canned the old and appointed nine new members. But like the old board — and like most Memphians — few of the nine are regular transit riders.
UPDATE: Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024 – The newly appointed MATA Board voted to suspend plans to cut routes and to increase fares. The suspension will last until Feb. 3, when the board can reevaluate. Rescinding the changes is expected to cost about $5 million before that date, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young has committed to “work(ing) with the City Council to identify additional funding necessary to cover the increased cost incurred by this pause.”
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1970s, riders were plentiful. MATA operated more than 300 buses in an area covering a little over 100 square miles, according to John Lancaster, MATA’s chief development officer. Although the city has sprawled outwards, MATA now operates just 55 fixed route buses to cover an area of 280 square miles when about 74 buses are needed.
Spurred by historic and national patterns shaped by white flight and predominantly Black ridership, MATA has been continually underfunded, leading to long wait times and buses that sometimes don’t arrive at all. And that has led to a negative narrative fed by an unpleasant fact: The system is largely ineffective in getting Memphians from one place to another.
To change that narrative, officials have to figure out how to regain the trust of riders, and they must pitch the importance of public transit to a population that, for the most part, doesn’t use it.
Experts say that’s a tough sell. But some cities have managed to do it.
“Cities that maintain service and adapt service to new travel patterns … those systems are recapturing riders,” said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. “The ones that basically are forced to make those big cuts, they’re going to lose even more what their small percentage of ridership was in their region.”
MATA narrative stems from ineffective system
The decline of Memphis’ public transit system and the resulting narrative mirrors the story of transit systems nationwide, said Bloom.
Transit, which 100-120 years ago was often run by private companies, was once “considered, in essence, like one of the great elements of American infrastructure at the time, as important as the development of clean water sources (and) the emergence of electrical,” he said.
With the advent of the automobile, private companies went bankrupt or had to cut services to maintain profitability, a cycle that continued “to the point at which they were serving a very small amount of potential riders.”
At the same time, the predominantly white middle class began to leave city cores, taking “with them their tax dollars (and) their fares. … They refused to support city or regional transit at a high level.”
By the time transit systems became public in the ’60s or ’70s, many were poorly funded, with a predominantly Black ridership, Bloom said.
Just over 1.1 million rides were taken on Memphis Transit Authority vehicles in fiscal year 2024. Despite that, more than 25,000 Memphis households don’t have access to a vehicle, according to the nonprofit Innovate Memphis.
The city also offers on-demand microtransit in specific service areas as well as paratransit for people with disabilities. Until this year, MATA also maintained a beleaguered vintage trolley system, now on indefinite shutdown due to safety concerns about brakes.
In a scathing report released this month, consultant TransPro blasted MATA for “poor financial management and oversight” and a “lack of focus on the daily needs of customers.”
The report found that MATA’s boardings per revenue hour is 23% lower than the peer average – and that MATA only delivers 76% of the service it schedules. That means 24% of buses don’t arrive at all. Of those that do arrive, 36% are not on time.
“This narrative does not need to define MATA indefinitely,” read the report. “By focusing on a strategy that delivers a high quality customer experience, a financially sustainable service offering, and value to the community, MATA has an opportunity to change this narrative.”
But while transit has struggled nationwide, the situation is particularly dire in Memphis.
“There isn’t another system in the country that has headways or intervals of two hours,” said John Lewis, a consultant with TransPro, to the Memphis City Council on Tuesday. “This is the kind of structural misalignment that we find in MATA. MATA customers simply want reliable service, and they aren’t getting that today.”
Over the years, the view of transit in Memphis has gone from something working-class Memphians could rely on to a system of “last resort,” only for those who had no other options. And, distrust in MATA’s operators has grown.
“If no one trusts us to operate, you know, transparently and responsibly, then we’re doomed before we get started,” said Bacarra Mauldin, MATA’s interim CEO, in an interview. “And so earning the community’s trust is going to be critically important.”
So far, the effort to fix the “structural misalignment” in MATA has included establishing an entirely new board and seeking an audit of financials. Young has said he hopes to rescind both layoffs and route cuts at least until February, giving the city time to determine a clearer picture of MATA’s financial situation and how much money it would take to stave off cuts.
Past effort saw transit awareness grow, but no dedicated funding
While experts know public transit has a positive impact on job access, property values, health and the environment, the pitch is hard to make to people used to driving cars, particularly when the current transit system is far from adequate.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris encountered that experience in 2019, when he brought experts before the Shelby County Commission regularly to urge that the county invest in a dedicated funding source for the city-owned transit agency.
“It takes quite a campaign to make transit a priority for the public,” Harris said. “But then the rubber met the road and nobody wanted to pay for it … We got stuck. That’s the bad news. The good news is the issue was raised, there was some momentum and people started to understand the importance of transit on a broad basis.”
Jackson McNeil, transportation and mobility director at Innovate Memphis and a newly appointed member of the MATA Board, said there are good examples of communities that have “made a very intentional effort to invest in public transit,” and that the narrative around that transit is important.
In Nashville, voters will decide this November on a proposal to increase the sales tax by a half-cent, with the funding going toward not just bus service, but also new traffic signals and sidewalks.
“They’re not calling it ‘Money for Metro,’” McNeil said. “They’re not calling it transit for transit dependent riders. They’re saying this is an investment that we can make in our community that’s going to increase quality of life for people that live in Nashville now, and it’s also going to be an economic development tool that’s going to help us continue to to grow and have more dollars to fund our our city, our systems.”
Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at [email protected]
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