This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If you run them, they will ride.
We only have a month's worth of stats so far. But it appears that the move by the Utah Transit Authority to start running some of its weekend bus routes more often and for longer hours was quickly met with rider approval.
Those numbers matter, and not just to people who are using the expanded transit service. It adds real weight to the argument that there is a demand for increased public transit offerings in UTA's service area. And that argues strongly for public approval of Proposition 1, the ballot measure that would add a quarter-cent to local sales tax rates for highways, roads, trails and public transit services.
Counting only the routes where Sunday service was added or expanded, ridership soared, from 354 over the course of one day to 1,461. Sunday rail, which also started earlier and ran later, saw ridership increase 14 percent, a very large hike to materialize in such a short time.
Ridership was also up, though by smaller percentages, on routes that were enhanced on Saturdays and weekdays.
As word gets around and habits adapt, those numbers should grow even more. Sunday service is key for people in service sector jobs, many of which know no weekends.
Such system improvements, and resulting increases in ridership, would continue if the sales tax hike passes. But that possibility is undermined by the fact that UTA is caught in a unhappy political spiral, largely of its own making.
Cutbacks in bus service caused by a perfect storm of fiscal drains — opening new rail lines and the Great Recession — harmed the public's faith in UTA. Public distaste for high executive salaries, global junkets and dubious development partnerships made the situation worse.
News that UTA would not grant any executive bonuses this year, rather than saying it would never use that pernicious import from the worst of private industry, shows that management there still has a tin ear for public perception.
That brings us to a pass where, just as the UTA shows that it gets the need to boost its base services for people most in need, public confidence in the agency is low. Low enough that folks who might have voted for a tax hike to pay for roads will be reluctant to approve one that will, in counties so served, allocate 40 percent of the take to public transit operations.
As a public body, UTA needs popular support more than it needs gasoline and pavement. It needs it even — especially — when it is trying to do a better job.
Voting down Proposition 1 out of anger at UTA would be momentarily satisfying to many of us. But, in the long run, it would only hurt the whole community.