Bobby
Wilson looked both ways before he tucked his clipboard under his arm
and stepped off the curb last week in front of the Clark Campbell
Transportation Center in downtown Winston-Salem. He
crossed the driveway to the notched concrete strip where dozens of bus
riders waited beneath numbered flags, delivered his pitch and offered a
petition.
“Yeah,
they need to do that,” she said as she signed her name. “’Cause some
people have to work on Saturdays and Sundays, and I don’t know how they
do that now.” Wilson and his organization, Human Understanding of
Management and Numismatics, or HUMAN, are lobbying the Winston-Salem
Transit Authority and the city council to extend bus service,
particularly on the weekends. The transit authority will expand service
on Saturdays this fall, taking routes that have shut down at 6 p.m. and
extending them to 11:30 to accommodate downtown visitors and workers.
But the service increase will not spill over to Sundays or holidays,
when the buses and their riders sit idle. So far, Wilson and his
supporters have taken their case to the transit authority’s board of
directors — where he said it was well received — and to the leadership
of a couple local bus systems. Winston-Salem
city administrators invited them to speak in front of the city council
on July 21. There he will present the 2,700 signatures he and his team
of volunteers have collected during the last two weeks.
The
petition started circulating on July 7. Every day since then, Wilson
and his helpers have hit Campbell hard, starting as early as seven or
eight in the morning.
Wilson’s efforts are at least partially
symbolic. Although he’s concerned about people marooned by inadequate
weekend bus service, HUMAN is, at its core, an educational enterprise.
On a recent weekday, that education included teaching a reporter the definition of the acronym’s final letter: numismatic.
“It’s
the study of money,” he said. The group, which has existed since 1993,
has had a hand in promoting federal incentives for business owners who
hire convicted felons. Wilson said he recently organized an exhibition
of artwork by prisoners, planned a voter registration drive for county
inmates with misdemeanors and arranged a field trip to an equestrian
camp for inner city children.
“The mission is to improve mankind through education,” he said. One of the goals of the petition drive is to raise the awareness of bus riders, who may not realize that they can have a say in how the system works, he said. “I tell people to go to the board meetings,” Wilson said. “You won’t believe how well these people eat, and that’s your tax money paying for that.” One of the women he took to the July transit board meeting was a domestic worker unhappy with the lack of public transportation to the wealthy parts of town where she works. Wilson said it’s important to bring consumers to the transit board.
If the board were comprised of regular bus riders, Wilson said, then it might have recommended expanding Saturday service years ago for riders like Ben Sheppard, who uses the bus to get to work on that day. “I usually catch the bus early in the morning on Saturday and I catch it back at six o’clock before it stops running,” he said. “I like the idea of running on Sundays because Winston-Salem’s way behind and we need to catch up.” Greensboro Transit Authority has seven routes that run from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays. HiTran, the bus service in High Point, has no service in weekdays after 6:30 p.m., limited service on Saturdays and no service on Sundays.
Expanding Winston-Salem’s bus service to Sundays isn’t a matter of snapping your fingers, said Art Barnes, general manager of the Winston-Salem Transit Authority.
“It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow,” he said. “Expanding services this fall, that process took months and months.”
Funding is one of the stumbling blocks. A federal grant allowed city leaders to move forward with plans to expand service on Saturdays, but more money would have to be raised to keep buses going on Sundays.
Because the campaign to include Sundays and some holidays on the bus schedule is young, Barnes said he had no idea how much it might cost Winston- Salem taxpayers.
Wilson said the people he’s spoken to would support an increase in their tax rate if it paid for a seven-day-a-week bus system that would allow them to avoid emptying their wallets to fill up their cars.
“This
wasn’t really a community wide issue until it became an economic
crunch,” he said. “This is a town that has a lot of what you would call
working class people. It’s not a college town. We have a very strict
labor class of people. And we’re not servicing the people who need the
service.”
The riders standing in line for the Route 5 passed
the petition down the row, and most added their signatures. They will
be there — in spirit at least — when Wilson addresses the council.
“This
will give us a chance to have some remedy to this,” Wilson said. “A lot
of people are complacent because they don’t know how not to be.
Complacency is a very tough thing to overcome.”
To comment on this story, e-mail Amy Kingsley at amy@yesweekly.com.
