ACCORDING TO A new report titled “Monitoring the Culture of Sustainability at the University of Michigan,” dated Fall 2013, despite being provided with free rides on city buses, fewer than 10 percent of U-M’s 6,431 faculty and 35,846 staff use AAATA buses. The percentage of U-M faculty and staff who use AAATA city buses remained unchanged from the previous year, despite AAATA’s efforts to provide more free and discounted services to U-M faculty and staff.
According to the AAATA’s website:
U-M and the AAATA have a long history of cooperation and partnering in delivering high quality bus service to the Ann Arbor community. Over the years, the following partnerships have been formed:
Central Campus Transit Center
Service to and from Wolverine Tower (Route 36)
ExpressRide (commuter express bus service from Chelsea to Ann Arbor/U-M & Canton to Ann Arbor/U-M)
Park & Ride lots with free bus service for U-M faculty, staff and students.
Despite what AAATA officials term has been a “long history of cooperation,” and the dedication of significant taxpayers dollars toward resources for U-M’s community, the fact is that U-M faculty and staff surveyed said they knew “relatively little” about the range of options available to them. According to the report, “a third of the staff-faculty said they know “not much or nothing,” nearly a third said “a little” about AAATA.
According to the U-M report, “2013 travel behavior among members of the U-M community continues to be a source of greenhouse gas emissions. As in 2012, three-quarters of the 2013 staff and faculty respondents said the ‘always’ drive a car to their work place or did so ‘most of the time.’ In contrast, the numbers of staff and faculty who said they used alternative modes of travel to get to and from campus were small; less than 10 percent rode an Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority (AAATA) bus and just 4 percent of the staff said they carpooled. More faculty than staff reported using non-motorized forms of transportation (15 percent versus 5 percent).”
A large percentage of U-M faculty, staff and student respondents said they believe climate change is real: “U-M respondents are more likely than the U. S. population to believe that climate change is real. Whereas 9 in ten U-M respondents said that climate change is happening, somewhat less than two thirds of the U. S. population responded in this manner. U-M faculty members were the most likely believers (93 percent) while students (90 percent) and staff respondents (81 percent) were somewhat least likely to say that climate change is happening.”
U-M faculty and staff are disinclined to change their behaviors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from the use of automobiles. The report, in fact, reveals that U-M staff commute significantly longer distances than do faculty, but that both groups continue to snub free public transit. According to the report’s authors:
“The data from the 2013 sample show that on average, employees who are staff travel twice as far as faculty in their journey to work (11.4 miles versus 5.7 miles). Whereas somewhat more than a third of staff members live within 4 miles of campus, two-thirds of the faculty travel this relatively short distance. In contrast, staff respondents are 3 times more likely than faculty to commute more than 15 miles to the University (27 miles versus 9 miles). Compared to the 2012 sample, both the 2013 staff and faculty respondents live further away from campus.”
While more students than faculty and staff ride buses, they’re riding U-M buses. Again, from the report: “As expected, students were much less likely to drive to campus than U-M employees. Nonetheless, when asked how they most often traveled to/from campus since the beginning of the fall semester, 9 percent of undergraduates and 20 percent of graduate students said they drove a car. More than half (55 percent) typically walked or biked to campus and somewhat less than half said they rode the bus.”
At Washtenaw Community College, reduced price bus passes were deemed unsuccessful in easing congested parking. According to a 2009 story in The Washtenaw Voice student newspaper, “Vice President of Instruction Roger Palay evaluated whether the bus pass program, which cost the college $75,000 in the Fall semester, improved the lack of parking and found that it was not very successful. Associate Vice President of Student Services Linda Blakey said, “They’re taking the bus all over the place, but not to campus. And that’s not really saving us any parking spaces.” WCC officials subsequently decided to reactivate the free ride program. To date, data on whether the program has eased parking congestion have not been made public.
How much money do you have to invest in something before it becomes clear the people who you’re trying to attract just aren’t interested? The most telling thing to me is the number of U-M faculty and staff who know little to nothing about our city’s bus system. This is the result of a failed strategy of focusing resources on commuters as opposed to designing a system for the people who pay the bills, the residents.
This doesn’t mean we should give up on transit, it means we need more investment in it. Students and staff will ride more often when service is more frequent and reaches more locations. A large portion of UM staff members commute from outside Washtenaw County (partially because they’re priced out of Ann Arbor), and due to our egregious lack of regional transit don’t have an option besides auto travel. Somebody who drives to work at UM from Southfield is hardly “snubbing” the AAATA.
There’s quite a bit of money invested already. You can’t look at the millions and millions and say after all this time and all these millions that the solution is to spend yet more millions. Most people prefer not to take buses. Poor and wealthy alike. I was very very poor and still preferred driving over the bus, risking my life in a car that had no wipers and needed a gallon of water poured into the radiator every few miles.
And driving enormous empty buses around for 10 hours doesn’t help the green house gases.
Most people prefer not to take the bus. End of story.