RTA bus service cuts prompt Civil Rights Act analysis
7th March 2024 · 0 Comments
By Bobbi-Jeanne Misick
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — Recent changes to many of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority’s bus schedules have prompted an analysis to ensure newly extended wait times, implemented in January, do not disproportionately burden minority and low-income residents in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act.
The report, which was released ahead of an upcoming RTA board of commissioners meeting held on Tuesday (Feb. 27), said the analysis found a “small disproportionate burden and disparate impact for low-income and minority communities,” but added that the negative impacts would be offset by improved reliability. Officials also stressed that the service cuts were intended to be temporary.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal assistance, like the RTA, are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. According to the RTA’s own policy – which the Federal Transit Administration requires it to maintain – whenever transit officials are proposing a major change to service, the agency must conduct a Title VI analysis to determine how the proposal would impact riders.
In January, the RTA reduced bus service in 15 out of the agency’s 30 lines, impacting thousands of riders. Scheduled wait times between buses increased by as much as 40 minutes on some routes. In New Orleans East, buses on the 66 Haynes Loop, which serves the Little Woods neighborhood, doubled, going from running every 35 minutes to every 70 minutes. And in the West Bank, wait time between buses on the 105 Algiers Local also doubled, from 40 minutes to 80 minutes.
Some of the bus routes with the biggest changes to wait times since the January cuts operate in predominantly Black neighborhoods, including Little Woods in New Orleans East and Behrman and Whitney on the West Bank. The RTA’s Title VI analysis report showed that 72 percent of the city’s minority residents and just under 25 percent of its low-income residents were impacted by the changes. Both categories are slightly overrepresented – the RTA’s service area is about 69 percent non-white and 24 percent low-income.
But the agency stressed in the report that the changes were intended to be “as short as possible” and were reflective of the unscheduled service interruptions that riders were already dealing with due to frequent breakdowns of aging buses.
“Those daily, fleet induced reductions, however, are not planned or predictable for riders,” the report said. “The goal is that even if the bus is less frequent, you are more confident it will arrive at the scheduled time.”
A spokesperson for the RTA said the Title VI process should incorporate community feedback from a public hearing into service changes, but that since the changes were necessary due to major issues with available buses, “there was little we could do to incorporate said feedback into this Winter change.”
The spokesperson said the agency would incorporate community feedback into summer and fall schedules. RTA has purchased 21 new buses with COVID-19 relief funds, and CEO Lona Edwards Hankins has said those vehicles are expected to be on the road in Fall 2024. Assembly on an additional eight buses is expected to begin in early 2025.
Cuts meant to improve on-time pickup rates
The recent changes cut the number of available buses from 126 to 108. It also reduced the number of buses required to be on the road during peak service hours from 87 to 73. That means the remaining 35 active buses, some of which might be receiving maintenance work on any given day, might be available to replace buses that are taken out of service. Fewer buses on the road has led to longer scheduled wait times between pickups.
RTA officials have said the schedule cuts should ensure that buses actually arrive on schedule. For months leading up to the cuts, riders complained of longer than anticipated wait times, as aging buses were often breaking down and being pulled off the street for repairs causing gaps in service.
RTA has not released on-time performance data for January as of presstime. Those numbers are likely to become available in March or April. Previous reports have shown improvements in on-time-performance since the summer.
On a recent bus trip from the 7th Ward to New Orleans East and through much of Gentilly, Verite found that all buses – the Broad-Napoleon line, the Little Woods Loop, the Haynes Loop and the 57 Franklin line – arrived at or near their scheduled times, and passengers were able to make on-time connections between buses.
“That’s what we want to hear,” Courtney Jackson, executive director of transit advocacy organization Ride New Orleans said when she was informed about the trip.
However Jackson said it was too early to tell whether or not the changes were actually working, given that the numbers on performance are not available yet and that through its own outreach Ride is finding that some riders say reliability is still an issue.
“We don’t want to have an opinion on something that we don’t have all the information for,” Jackson said. “We’re excited to see what those numbers are saying.”
Tim Cardner, a musician who lives in the 7th Ward, rides the Broad-Napoleon bus to Canal Street where he connects to the streetcar nearly every day. He said before the changes buses were breaking down frequently, causing delays that were not properly communicated on the RTA’s Le Pass app or on TransitApp, which he finds more reliable.
“The app would show that the bus would be coming to you and then it would stop and then it would just disappear and then the time would countdown, but the bus wouldn’t come,” Cardner said.
He said while breakdowns seem to be happening less often, he doesn’t think the bus has become more reliable.
“The buses are still being late,” Cardner said. “Sometimes they bunch together so it seems like the frequency is high but then there’ll be a 30-minute, 40-minute gap.”
Jackson from Ride acknowledged that reliability might improve over time and said Mardi Gras parade schedules may have affected reliability in recent weeks.
Some riders worry that as service has become more reliable on some lines, it may be affecting routes where cuts weren’t made. Corey Jackson, a chef who works in the French Quarter, gets to work on the Franklin line, which was not among the lines affected by service cuts. He said before the January cuts to the other lines, the bus almost always arrived at 5:15 a.m.
“I would leave out my house between 5:05 and 5:10 and the bus was always on time,” he said.
But roughly two weeks ago, the bus did not arrive at 5:15. He checked the RTA’s LePass App and the wait time continued to change. Eventually he said he got a ride from a friend who was passing by. Since then, he said, he has been late to work once or twice when relying on the bus.
This article originally published in the March 7, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
