Say Anything Blog

Grand Forks Herald employee Tu Uyen Tran had a story in the paper the other day.  This story was sadly pretty typical for what the readers get now days.  After reading the story the reader is less informed than they were before.  That is because he writes the article with an agenda which leaves the public without the facts they need.
The story is on bus ridership going up. 

The Grand Cities’ bus service has seen a boom in ridership this year despite relatively low gas prices.

Almost every route throughout the two cities has seen more riders, from Route 3 to Altru Health System to Route 13 to Aurora Medical.

In the first six months of the year, there were 15,872 more rider-trips compared with the same month in 2008, an increase of 12.5 percent.

Tran wants us to believe that everything’s going great with the CAT service.  While ridership may be up 12.5% but Tran conveniently forgets to inform the public that it cost the public 29%.  That figure is easily obtainable on page 194 of the city budget.  It’s this kind of mentality at the Herald that’s leading to their financial failure.

Not only that, part of that increase in funding is a $500,000 carryover.  They’re spending savings.  How much do you want to bet that when the savings are exhausted that the taxpayers are going to get hit much harder.  Come to think of it, the purpose of this story was probably to portray the bus program as a success before the debate comes out to increase the property tax subsidy.

Tran mentions that “most” of the subsides comes from the federal government.  Never mind that the subsidy that came out of your property tax bill rose as well (5%).  Tran doesn’t tell you that the property owners are paying roughly twice as much to provide the bus service than do the guys that ride the bus.

A full fare passenger pays $1.50.  The property tax payers are paying another $2.73 cents for that guy to ride. 

The total cost for the guy to ride is over $10.  Tran suggests that somehow that’s ok because some of the money comes from the federal government.  No, that’s not ok.  Wasting money wherever it comes from is not ok.  The bus riders wouldn’t pay $10 to pay themselves so why is it ok to have everyone else pay for him?

Extrapolating the numbers from Tran’s story it appears that there will be 285,000 bus trips by the end of the year.  That’s pretty pathetic.  If you assume the average rider rides the bus five days a week it figures out that we have 548 bus riders (285,000 divided by two trips a day, times five days a week, 52 weeks a year.  The total budget of the bus service less the user fees is $2,682,041.  The subsidy per bus rider is $4,894.26 each and every year.

It’d be cheaper buying them their own car.  It’d be cheaper yet to have their friends and family drive them around. 

So now you can see why Tran’s story about booming bus ridership leaves the reader more uninformed than they were before.  No wonder why their circulation is dropping off faster than can believed.