Letter to County Council on Ride-On Cuts, April 27, 2010
The Action Committee for Transit strongly opposes the proposed additional cuts in Ride-On bus service that the County Executive submitted on April 22. Ride-On service can be maintained by canceling plans for the $80 million Lot 31 garage in Bethesda and using the annual savings for Ride-On instead. We do support the proposal to eliminate MCDOT's pedestrian safety program.
We are deeply disturbed by the proposal for additional cuts in Ride-On bus service. Ride-On is an essential service that many citizens rely on to get to work and live our lives. In February, the County recognized the importance of providing transportation to all our citizens by removing snow from all county roads, even roads with little traffic. Yet now the county is proposing to cut Ride-On buses that transport many more people every day than many of those roads. In its recent vote for the White Flint Master Plan, the County Council seemed to show its support for the idea that transportation means moving people, not cars. Cutting Ride-On now would signal a return to the disastrous idea that transportation means moving cars.
We are extremely disappointed by MCDOT's failure to identify most of the routes that would be cut as a result of the April 22 proposal. This is not the way our county should be governed. County revenue comes from the public, and the public should be able to offer its opinions on the proposed cuts before the cuts are made.
The County can find the money to prevent cuts to Ride-On service by canceling its plans to waste $80 million on an overpriced underground parking garage in Bethesda that will sit empty almost all of the time. It is shameful that the county is willing to spend $80 million on this project while at the same time slashing budgets for Ride-On, social services, parks, libraries, public safety, and schools. If the Lot 31 garage were cut back to a single level, providing only enough parking spaces to replace the existing surface lot, the Bethesda parking tax could be reduced to near zero, and - as the council voted to do last year - a compensating increase in the mass transit tax would pay for maintaining Ride-On service. This would also show the county's commitment to its stated environmental, transportation, and land use goals.
Finally, we support the County Executive's April 22 proposal to eliminate MCDOT's pedestrian safety program. This program has largely been a waste of money, and its main purpose is to disguise MCDOT's refusal to change its anti-pedestrian policies. We can do much more for pedestrians, at far less cost, by designing complete streets that serve everybody, instead of incomplete streets that only serve people in cars.
The latest round of proposed cuts slashes transportation services for people who use buses, while making no reductions at all in services for people who use cars. We urge the Council to correct this imbalance. Scaling back the Lot 31 garage project will do very little harm to drivers and provide enormous benefits to people who rely on Ride-On..