When the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority reduced its bus service last fall, Vivian Skipper quit her part-time job.
The line she rode, Route 69, stopped running on Saturday evenings and Sundays.
“I was working at a church,” Skipper said, “so it kind of made it an impossible job to keep.”
Skipper, who lives without a car in Wakefield, said she also stopped traveling out of South County on the weekends. Skipper is one of many riders whose lives changed significantly when RIPTA implemented service cuts last September.
Though Gov. Dan McKee said in a recent statement that the cuts “targeted” lines with lower ridership, the changes were in fact sweeping: 45 of RIPTA’s 63 routes saw reductions in service, which RIPTA CEO Christopher Durand described as the largest service cut in the agency’s 59-year history. Ridership across the system quickly dropped 12%, according to RIPTA.
“We understand that even modest service changes can create challenges for riders,” said McKee’s press secretary, Olivia DaRocha.
But McKee said the service cuts helped the agency achieve “financial stability” as federal pandemic relief money finally dried up, and the state government faced a choice of whether it would cover the difference.
The service cuts amounted to $4.4 million in annual savings, according to RIPTA, or less than 3% of the agency’s $153 million budget and 0.03% of the overarching $14.2 billion state budget.
Skipper still rides Route 69 to shop for groceries and continues to work a full-time job remotely from her home in Wakefield. But she said the service cuts shrank her social life and turned simple errands into difficult, delicately timed trips.
“The effect could best be described as sometimes isolating, often debilitating,” Skipper said.
In interviews conducted on bus routes across Rhode Island, Ocean State Media heard from riders who lost hours of free time, reduced their working hours, or started paying for Uber and Lyft rides that eat up much of their earnings.
Barry Dejasu, who rides RIPTA from East Providence to an accounting firm in Warwick, said he initially had to take a pay cut so he could leave work early enough to accommodate the new bus schedule. He said he had to negotiate an arrangement with his employer to restore his previous level of pay.
“It’s affecting people’s jobs,” Dejasu said. “For people who work hourly or part-time, they have to work less because there’s suddenly that many fewer rides.”
In Cumberland, Kanena Leshon Peterson used to ride Route 75 to take his son to see movies at a mall in Lincoln, until the service stopped running on Saturdays and Sundays. Peterson said that leaves them son stuck at home on weekends. It also makes it more difficult for him to find a job, he said, because it limits the hours he can work.
His message to state leaders: “Try to think about all the stuff that you might be taking away from me.”
Another trove of rider responses came in through a survey distributed by a local advocacy group on a third-party app for transit riders.
Dylan Giles, lead activist for the Save RIPTA Coalition, which designed the survey, said the responses “were, frankly, devastating.”
“I’m a single mother who works full time,” one respondent said, according to a report shared by the coalition. “My car got stolen and my daughter is sick. There are far too many bus delays and I never get home on time to give her medicine myself.”
Another respondent said the bus they took home from the night shift at Target stopped running. “I work two jobs to pay my rent and now I’m forced to spend $110 per week on Lyfts because of the schedule cuts,” they said.
“To not be late to school, I would have to wake up at 5 a.m. each day,” another response began. “I am not a chronically tardy person but the buses have essentially turned me into one.”
Giles said over 250 RIPTA riders filled out the survey.
“Seeing the gravity of how this was impacting people’s day-to-day lives in this variety of ways was heartbreaking,” he said.
The Save RIPTA Coalition has a lobbyist working at the State House, fighting to reverse the cuts. But McKee’s latest budget proposal keeps them in place.
“I think what the people who have the power to make these decisions should really consider is what it’s like for people who depend on this every single day,” said Dejasu, the East Providence- to- Warwick commuter. “Maybe it’s no problem for them, but it’s a big problem for so many other people.”
