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Montgomery, Ala. • Two blocks from the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, 17-year-old Tanesha Wilson listens to earbuds as she waits for the No. 8.
She takes two buses every afternoon to get to her job at McDonald's after spending her mornings studying math and science, the last two tests she must pass to get her GED and start studying for an accounting degree.
"I don't have a car," she said outside the transfer station waiting room, which is full of mostly black riders. "I have to take the bus."
Sixty years after Parks' arrest sparked the historic boycott to end racial segregation on Montgomery's buses, the overwhelmingly black ridership of Montgomery's bus system no longer faces legalized racial segregation — but they face a bus system that advocates call inadequate.
"We went from the back of the bus to where's the bus?" said Stephen Stetson, a policy analyst for Alabama Arise, an advocacy group for the state's low-income families.
Montgomery's system, like public transportation in many cities, is short of money and long on challenges such as urban sprawl, declining passenger numbers, tight budgets, and government policy choices that value freeways over mass transit.
Fifteen bus routes crisscross the city, where tourist attractions herald Montgomery's dual role as the birthplace of the Confederacy and the civil rights movement. But some riders say buses don't always run on schedule — as buses break down — and don't go where, and when, they need them need to go.
Rosie Ann Reeves works in housekeeping at a hotel less than six miles from her home. The trip takes about 15 minutes by car, but Reeves must rely on the city transit system. Reeves gets up at 4:45 each morning to catch a 6:15 bus that gets her to work by about 7:50 a.m., but she doesn't clock in until 9.
"If you miss a bus you have to wait an hour and a half or two," said Reeves.
The buses stop in the evening, have reduced service on Saturdays and don't run at all on Sundays.
Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said it's difficult for the city to come up with the $3 million it steers to the bus system each year.
"It is always a challenge to make sure that you've got adequate lines, you've got adequate equipment, and we actually run close to a million and a half miles a year," Strange said. "But is that enough? A lot of people tell you it's not. But, at the same time, are you going to put more buses on or are you going to put more police officers or more firefighters on?"
Alabama is one of four states, along with Arizona, Hawaii and Utah, that provide no state tax dollars for public transportation.
While direct statistical comparisons with 1955 are difficult, anecdotal evidence suggests ridership today in Montgomery is more heavily black.
In his book, "Stride Toward Freedom the Montgomery Story," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that he told city officials during the 1955 boycott negotiations that 75 percent of the segregated bus system's riders were black.
A 2007 ridership survey by First Transit, which now runs the bus system, found that 84 percent of today's riders are black.
Stetson said the Southern city has some built-in challenges in trying to sustain a transit system. Sprawl to the city's east side, fueled by white and middle class flight, stripped the city of the urban density that lends itself to an efficient transit system. The state's conservative fiscal climate makes it difficult to raise money, he said.
Callie Greer, a bus rider and activist with the Montgomery Transportation Coalition, puts it more bluntly. She believes buses aren't a funding priority since they are primarily used by minorities and low-income people.
"This is about economic justice. You have to get to work to have a job," she said.