Saturday, 14 July 2012

OUR VIEW: No surprise, report ranks the Birmingham area near the bottom in connecting jobs and workers. It should be a call to action

Here's a shocker: A new study ranks Birmingham near the bottom of U.S. cities in getting workers to jobs via public transit.

Who would have thought transit here was so, well, deficient?

The answer, of course, is anyone who has been stranded on a broken-down Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority bus. Anyone who has had to endure an hour or longer wait at a bus stop only to have to wait longer for a connecting bus at Central Station. Anyone who has spent the better part of a day getting to and from a doctor's appointment or shopping trip because he had to take a bus.

And, of course, anyone without a car who lives on one side of the county, works on the other side and needs a bus to get there but can't because the bus doesn't go there.

In short, bus service in the metro Birmingham came about its ranking the old-fashioned way: It earned it.

You have heard this refrain before. The woefully underfunded bus system has too few buses on too few routes and covers too little of Jefferson County.

It didn't take yet another national study to point that out. But the study deserves more than a headline in the newspaper. It deserves the attention of policymakers -- especially legislators -- who can and should do something to improve bus service and the area's dismal transit ranking.

The report, by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, rated Birmingham No. 90 out of 100 U.S. cities when it comes to connecting employers with potential workers by mass transit.

Getting workers to jobs is the most important -- though certainly not the only important -- function of a transit system. When it fails so spectacularly to deliver on that function, it's a disaster for a metro area. So underperforming is Birmingham's bus system that only a few thousand riders a day venture to use it. And those few, for the most part, do so because they have no alternative.

And that's not the biggest shame, though many of those riders endure time-wasting hardship to ride the BJCTA buses. The bigger shame is that many thousands more workers who probably would ride the bus can't because the bus system doesn't go where they need to go and when.

The BJCTA only serves Birmingham and a handful of suburban cities in Jefferson County. Most of the county and its municipalities get no bus service.

The reason, of course, is money. The BJCTA is heavily dependent on Birmingham for the bulk of its local funding. A few cities, including Bessemer, Mountain Brook, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Hoover, Fairfield and Midfield -- pay for limited service.

But the most obvious missing partner in transit funding is the state. Alabama, unlike most states, doesn't contribute one cent to public transit -- anywhere.

Making matters worse, lawmakers repeatedly have ignored or voted down attempts to establish a dedicated funding stream for transit in Jefferson County, such as a vehicle registration fee. Of course, not funding what in much of America is seen as a vital public service has its human costs, which, sadly, our elected officials are too willing to turn their backs on.

The Brookings report connecting jobs and transit probably didn't raise those officials' eyebrows. They already know the bus system's shortcomings. They are just unwilling to do anything about it.

That doesn't mean riders, potential riders and, yes, employers, can't demand they do.

Source: http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-commentary/2012/07/our_view_no_surprise_report_ra.html

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