Politics & Government

Although Not Many, Manchester Riders Say They Depend on Their Bus Service

A handful of riders attended a public forum Wednesday to inform CTTransit officials that they depend on the town's local bus service as their primary means of transportation.

If Manchester residents are concerned or unhappy about the state of the town's bus service, you couldn’t tell it Wednesday based on the turnout of a forum with Connecticut Transit officials to discuss local service. 

That’s because, aside from CTTransit and Connecticut Department of Transportation officials and several members of the media, barely anybody showed up to attend the meeting Wednesday night in the Lincoln Center Hearing Room. Less than a dozen riders turned out and offered feedback to the transit officials, with a handful of residents dominating the conversation.

“It’s a good place to have this meeting, it’s just not a good time to have it in the middle of August,” said Cheryl Dubois, a Manchester resident who said she relies on the town’s bus service as her primary means of transportation. “That’s why there’s nobody here.”

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Dubois said that she would like to see more service on weekends instead of the truncated routes that many of the town’s buses run, and that she thought that ridership of CTTransit buses could be improved by expanding the routes and making it easier to get to places outside of town with fewer transfers and less waits.

“I cannot get to a grocery store on Sunday because there are no buses from my area of town that go near a grocery store,” Dubois said.

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She urged anyone concerned over a recent announcement by the Department of Transportation that it was considering raising fares and reducing services to contact Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and express their displeasure.

“It’s bad enough we don’t have jobs being created, but I need the bus to get to work,” said Dubois. “If you reduce the amount of buses, that’s going to put more people out of work, which is going to increase the amount of unemployment.”

Gordon Plouffe, another Manchester resident who said the bus was his primary means of transportation, hoped CTTransit would consider expanding bus service east of the Connecticut River to make it easier to get to areas outside of Manchester. Plouffe said a simple visit to his doctor’s office in Vernon and back home on the bus can take over three hours some days.

“In this economy, people have less and less money to work with, and more and more people have to give up their cars. The bus is the next logical means of transportation, and I really depend on it,” Plouffe said. “I just worry that if the state cuts bus service, the people who really, really need a hand up are going to lose access.”

Jose Calhoun, another Manchester rider, urged CTTransit officials to consider a significant expansion of the state’s bus service, with the fares to match if need be, which he said would make the bus lines more accessible and attractive to potential riders by offering them more travel options and convenience. Calhoun said he wished he didn’t have to ride the bus into Hartford most times he wanted to transfer to a connecting line.

“You need to collect people locally, and then you need to be able to deliver them long distances,” Calhoun said. “I think you could greatly cut down the amount of time that people are on the bus, which would create a lot more people using your buses.”

David Lee, CTTransit’s general manager, who presided over the meeting, said that the Manchester forum was arranged weeks before the DOT announced a series of public hearings it plans to hold throughout the state later this month to consider fare increases and service reductions to many of the state’s bus lines.

“We planned this meeting several weeks ago without knowing the state is going to have these other meetings,” he said.

Lee said the DOT, which CTTransit is a division of, ultimately sets bus fares and service routes, and that “they try to come up with solutions to not do too much too quickly” in regards to fare increase or cuts to service. He said the feedback provided by the Manchester riders’ at Wednesday’s forum would be considered by the department when it looked at the impact of fare increases and service reductions later this month.

It currently costs an adult $1.25 to ride a CTTransit bus, $1 for youths ages five to 18, and 60 cents for seniors or the disabled; an unlimited 31-day pass can be obtained for $45.


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