Suffolk County Transit riders were left in a lurch after New York State’s legislative session ended without securing funding for expanded bus service last week.
Suffolk County State Senators and Assembly members failed to deliver for bus riders, despite a letter from Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone to Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Legislature, calls from advocates and the delivery of over 1,500 petitions from bus riders to Suffolk County’s state delegation requesting the additional funds to be used for expanded service later into evenings and on Sundays.
This is unfortunate news, especially given that riders demonstrated the popularity of expanding Sunday service on 10 of the system’s 53 routes earlier this year. Since the launch of Sunday service in January through the middle of June, ridership on those routes has grown by an average of 192 percent, proving that if the service is provided system-wide, Suffolk County residents will use it.
Riders were disappointed when additional funds were not included in the state’s final budget, passed at the end of March, and had pinned their hopes on Suffolk County State Senators and Assembly members finding ‘off-budget’ funding for the system by the end of the legislative session. A similar funding allocation had been secured by Nassau County’s State Senators for Nassau County’s bus system in 2011.
One of the major questions all of us who support public transit is why is it that in the 1950s bus transit could be privately operated without government subsidy other than the provision of streets and roads while now bus and rail transit require both operating and vehicle purchase subsidies? Is this saying we need a different way of providing transportation, different land use patterns, or something else. Given the financial pressures at all levels of government, making mobility self supporting has great advantages.