To pass it, churches, faith-based groups and local organizers teamed up with businesses and institutions.  As we’ve seen in similar local measures, they won by explaining exactly what taxpayer money would buy, building a diverse coalition and getting out the vote.

This in-depth story is part of our Transportation Vote 2012 coverage. Communities across the country are preparing to vote on the people, plans and projects that will set the tone for transportation progress in the months and years to come. These are the places that will provide the energy, innovation and inspiration for the next national vision for transportation. Transportation Vote 2012 will help educate voters, advocates and candidates and keep abreast of transportation-related issues as they unfold.

A crisis point

Even before the prolonged fiscal crisis hitting governments everywhere, Baton Rouge’s Capital Area Transit System (CATS) struggled to do more with less. Over the last few years, service had degraded to the point that the wait for a bus exceeded 75 minutes and average rides were over two hours long. The system was saved repeatedly only by last-ditch city budget shuffles, creative grants and even private donations.

The biggest recent blow came when Louisiana State University backed out of the CATS system after years of student complaints and contracted with a new (more expensive) private operator. That meant a loss of $2.4 million from the CATS annual budget.

In 2010, a parish-wide tax to support the transit system failed at the ballot box, in part because large parts of the parish (same as counties in other states) don’t use or have access to the service. When projections came in that the transit agency would be so far in the red they’d have to shut down in summer 2011, it became painfully clear that something major needed to be done.

After cobbling together grants and funding to make it through 2011, the mayor appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to make recommendations not only to save the service, but to create something much better. But the first job was to save the system, as Rev. Raymond Jetson, the chair of that commission, told the Baton Rouge Advocate:  “Before there can be a robust transit system, before you can do novel things like light rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and before you can have street cars from downtown to LSU, you have to have a backbone to the system,” he said. “And that backbone is a quality bus system.”

The commission learned that Baton Rouge was the largest city of its size in the country to have a transit system without a dedicated revenue source, subsisting on annual local government appropriations.

But before putting a funding measure to voters, the commission recommended significant reforms to the composition of the transit board and an end to the ability of the Metro Council to veto the board’s decisions. “Governance reform and long term accountability … helped separate it from the previous failed measures,” said Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge, a broad, multi-racial, faith-based coalition of institutions backing the measure.

Photo courtesy of Frank McMains, www.frankmcmains.com

So how did they do it?

Coalition building

The first step was to build the core coalition that would push this measure to victory.

Enter Together Baton Rouge, a relatively new organization of churches, faith-based groups, social workers, and university students and groups. Together Baton Rouge led the way as the grassroots behind the measure, coordinating call banks, get-out-the-vote rallies, more than 120 educational “transit academies” and door-to-door canvassing of tens of thousands of homes by hundreds of volunteers. (Note that LSU students chose to get actively involved even though CATS was no longer the provider of their transit service on campus.)

They began with three informational meetings with 300-400 people each, where “community members told other community members why things were bad and what the new plan was,” said Bagert.

“We asked two questions on the sign-in card: ‘Do you want to be part of a voter outreach campaign?’ and, ‘Are you part of an organization and would you be willing to organize one of these sessions?’ We built a strong base of people that wanted to help do outreach and educate their fellow community members.”

Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

In part because of the groundwork of the Blue Ribbon Commission and other partnerships, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber got on board along with other business groups. Hotels and hospitals, whose leaders realized how much of their workforce depended on CATS each day, joined in.

Colletta Barrett, vice president of missions for Our Lady of the Lake hospital system told the Advocate that 10 percent of OLOL’s staff, or 400 people, use CATS.

It is imperative, she said, that a transit system is available to move people from North Baton Rouge to the medical corridor in the southern part of the parish.“It’s unacceptable that it takes an hour and 45 minutes to get to this side of town,” she said. “We have told our employees that we have an individual social responsibility to take care of each other.”

And:

Ralph Ney, hotel general manager for Embassy Suites [hotel], said about 15 percent of his workforce uses CATS to get to work, which sometimes results in his employees being late.

“It’s difficult to hire and maintain employees who don’t have transportation,” said Ney, who was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission. “It’s evolved to where a lot of our employees don’t even take the bus because they can’t get to work on time, so they’re riding bikes or catching rides.”

A key part of the coalition was the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX), a T4 America partner and non-profit that helps Louisiana communities with planning issues and addressing complex problems with effective, forward-thinking, implementable solutions. They became involved through their CONNECT initiative to build a diverse coalition across the New Orleans to Baton Rouge super region to advocate for smarter housing and transportation investments. The CONNECT initiative concluded that one of the critical pieces for regional connectivity is a viable, robust transit system serving the metro area. This was also strongly recommended in the new comprehensive plan for Baton Rouge, called FutureBR.

CPEX worked with many of the former members of the Blue Ribbon Commission to create the Baton Rouge Transit Coalition, a diverse set of partners who provided information, resources and conducted educational outreach to the Baton Rouge community.  They hosted numerous outreach meetings, advocated for the changes to CATS governance in the state house, created a website that became a clearinghouse for facts and research during the campaign, and worked closely with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber to solicit support from the business community — in addition to being a strong part of the grassroots effort led primarily by Together Baton Rouge.

In the end, the boosters of the transit measure had built a coalition that had strong grassroots, wide reach, and a diverse range of interests. Without the participation of any one of the core coalition members — Together Baton Rouge’s grassroots and trusted community members, CPEX and their coalition of transit boosters and others, and the area Chamber and the business community — the effort would not have had the same success.

Trusted messengers — and message

Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge summed up this strategy simply: “We let the community leaders be out front leading the way. Not professionals, not paid staff, not elected officials, not transit officials.”

“One of the strengths of this effort was that the plan was created by community leaders and many of the important people were already behind the plan,” said Rachel DiResto of CPEX. “It certainly took some effort to get new folks on board, but the important pillars were already on board. We didn’t need to convince them.”

For the message, especially in the key districts with heavy transit usage and service, the campaign kept it very basic. “Save our system.” They noted that Baton Rouge was the only city of its size without a decent transit system, and talked about the people who depend on it each day: Perhaps the nurse who cares for your mother at the hospital, or your neighbor or friend. The campaign steered clear of some of the typical statistics in transit campaigns about reducing traffic congestion, gas prices or environmental impacts.

The above story about the hospital and hotel workers shows how the advocates built a larger, inclusive narrative and a vision for the community’s future. The events were filled with personal stories and made the impact of the system (and the potential impacts of not having it or having it improved) clear to everyone, regardless of who they were, where they lived, or whether or not they rode CATS.

Success wasn’t due to being the smartest person in the room armed with the most data and facts. It was about making the impacts real and relatable through powerful stories helping people realize the bonds and impacts of community.

“Outreach, outreach, outreach”

To deliver that message, Together Baton Rouge and the coalition held an insanely ambitious number of community outreach sessions they called “transit academies” or “civic academies” in churches, community centers and other venues. In the four-month campaign leading up to the April 21 vote, they hosted 120 of these sessions.

“Anywhere anyone wanted to hear more, we did a presentation,” said DiResto of CPEX. “And it paid off with more people who hadn’t been active voters showing up at the polls for a special election.”

Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

These meetings were largely targeted to areas and precincts where support and heavy turnout would be needed to shift the outcome of the vote. “The diversity of those meetings was a huge plus,” DiResto said. “People who would never ride CATS were sitting in the same meetings with those who ride it every day. And their stories really impacted the former.”

The Advocate told one such story, about Fred Skelton, a 70-year-old Baton Rouge homeowner who had never ridden a CATS bus before. But during one community meeting he said he would be “first in line at his voting precinct to support” the 10-year, 10.6-mill property tax. The reason, he said, is because before his mother died, she used to stay at a nursing home where he’d visit her. When he visited, he said, he remembered frequently seeing groups of employees waiting for the bus.

“Those people who were waiting for the bus are the people who were taking care of my mother,” he said. “If we shut down the transit system, who will take care of those people?”

Strategic precinct targeting

Resources are always limited in a campaign, and therefore best deployed where they can make the most impact. The overall strategy — change minds of people on the fence, increase support from typically opposed groups, or focus primarily on the base — determines where resources should be targeted.

One of the biggest differences between this successful measure and the recent failed measure in 2010 was the use of more strategic targeting of resources in key precincts. Though the campaign did deploy some resources in suburban areas with small amounts of service, mostly to blunt opposition, the brunt of their efforts focused on getting out the vote in their strongest precincts.

Canvassing team. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

“We did detailed analysis of the electorate,” said Bagert of Together Baton Rouge. “We referred to the recent failed measure for background, which helped analyze the lay of the land. We focused our direct energy on turning out the strongest [most supportive] precincts, leaving out voters that had no voting history in the last 4 years. We tried to get 10 percent of the 2008 presidential election voters to vote for the measure.”

As a result of this strategy, the campaign was well poised to bounce back and succeed when The Advocate threw a curveball late in the game and editorialized against the transit tax, which likely cost the campaign a significant amount of support in precincts with already low support or people and groups that were undecided.

Making the benefits tangible and measurable

Whether it is the federal program or a local ballot measure, voters need to know what our dollars are really “buying” at the end of the day. Are they going to fix our bridges? How will they better connect workers with jobs, make their lives eaier, save them money?

On this count, the coalition in Baton Rouge did an admirable job of making this crystal clear — backed in large part by the commission recommendations that had large buy-in from day one. In every meeting they offered a list of promised CATS improvements:

CATS promises the following changes if the tax passes:

• Decreased average wait times for buses from 75 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Eight new express and limited stop lines, serving the airport, universities, mall and other areas.
• GPS tracking on the entire fleet, with exact arrival times accessible on cellphones.
• New shelters, benches and signage at bus stops.
• Expanded service to high-demand areas and increased routes, from 19 to 37.
• Three new transfer centers operating in a grid system to replace the outdated route system that leads all buses back to Florida Boulevard.
• A foundation for Bus Rapid Transit, a system in which buses get their own right-of-way lanes.

The ambitiousness of the promised changes was part of the success. Given the (somewhat unfair) perception that CATS was a poorly governed money drain, simply offering up a plan to pour money into CATS and hope for the best was not going to fly. People had to be inspired to believe that things actually would get better.

Similar specificity and transparency, including a long-range map of projects, helped win 67 percent of the vote for Measure R in Los Angeles. Supporters in Atlanta hope that a pre-approved list of transit and road projects will help convince voters to support a regional sales tax this July. The Baton Rouge formula – specific improvements, accountability reforms and relentless grassroots engagement – could offer a path to similar success.

Wrapping it up

The transit ballot measure was approved on April 21 in Baton Rouge, 54 percent to 46 percent and the municipality of Baker, 58 percent to 42 percent. In Zachary, a more suburban area with little service, it was rejected, 79 percent to 21 percent. Early returns showed the measure losing with only 40 percent support, but “then the precincts we had worked came in and voted in historic levels, supporting the measure at around 90 percent in those key precincts,” according to Bagert. “The key was really getting strong vote in supportive precincts.”

The story isn’t over, however.

The governance reforms for CATS, including changing the Metro Council’s veto power, are still passing through the state legislature. (The council’s veto power over changes in fares, routes, schedules and other operations was cited by the Blue Ribbon Commission as a key factor crippling the transit system.) The board nominating process will also change so that 13 different groups that have a stake in transit system (hospitals, businesses, etc.) can nominate members to the board.

Though some groups that were opposed are considering some legal challenges to the tax itself, the Baton Rouge story shows us a great success story of how a community rallied around their important transit system, fought to save it and improve it, and built a winning campaign to do exactly that.

Advice for others

Facing a ballot measure in your area? Planning one? Here are four last smart pieces of advice to take with you from Rachel DiResto from the Center for Planning Excellence.

• Bring core partners to the table early and find your champions who have to be willing to speak well to various audiences and who are willing to expend time and energy for your cause;
• Frequent communication with other partners is critical to maximize resources and not duplicate efforts;
• Focus on the voter outcome – grassroots advocacy is essential – target those folks who are supportive and mobilize them to show up to vote instead of spending all of your energy combatting those opposed.
• Frequent outreach to different sectors – know your message for various audiences

The election day team for Mid City. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

Excited? Encouraged? Learn something that you didn’t know before? Let us know in the comments.

Our sincere thanks go out to Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge and Rachel DiResto and Lacy Strohschein of the Center for Planning Excellence for their time and information for the behind-the-scenes story of their success. And also to Rebekah Allen of the Advocate, whose solid reporting on the issue for the last few years was invaluable for understanding and background, as well as the source of valuable quotes.

Follow all Transportation Vote 2012 coverage here.

Our friends at GOOD Magazine are holding a contest in partnership with Transportation Alternatives to find the most-loved bus routes in the country.

Check out the contest details below and send in your photo today for a chance at some pretty cool prizes:

…buses are an essential form of transit in cities across the country, and they account for a big chunk of the nearly 10.2 billion trips Americans took on public transportation in 2009. We think it’s time to give a little love to one of the least celebrated modes of transit. To that end, we’ve teamed up with Transportation Alternatives and an impressive group of bus-loving jurors to see and hear why your bus route is the best in America.

What is it about your bus route that you love? Is your bus driver brilliant? Is the view from your window breathtaking? Do your fellow riders characters belong in a Hemingway novel?

the OBJECTIVE

Show and tell us why your bus route is the best in America.

the ASSIGNMENT

Take a photo with your camera phone (no fancy cameras please) and send it to us with a 140 character or less caption by Wednesday, November 10.

the REQUIREMENTS

Photos should be taken with camera phones and each caption should include the location and route. Please include your name and the best way to reach you.
Email your entry to: busroutes@goodinc.com
Tweet your entry to: @GOOD and use the hashtag #bestbusride

LYMMO, Orlando’s free downtown bus service, is now in it’s 13th year of operation under the Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority. It was launched in August of 1997, carried its one millionth passenger within a year and has served more than 10 million since. With its own dedicated lane and control over stoplights within a three-mile radius of downtown, LYMMO is a convenient choice for riders in the core areas of Orlando. The bus runs every five minutes during peak office hours and 10 minutes in the evenings.

Although the system is strong already, a $10 million TIGER II grant will allow LYMMO to extend its current 2.5 mile and 13 station route by 1.9 miles. Most importantly, the new lines will connect downtown to Parramore, a low-income and historically underserved neighborhood located just west of Orlando’s Central Business District.

This extension of service is something that locals have wanted and it fits nicely into the city’s broader goals, dovetailing nicely into the Pathways for Parramore revitalization initiative that City officials launched in 2005.

Earlier this year, the Orlando City Council approved plans for a Creative Village adjacent to both downtown and Parramore. The village, which will take the place of Orlando’s Amway Arena, will include a mix of housing, economic development and educational facilities. Although the TIGER II funds will only cover the cost of the LYMMO service extension, city officials emphasized that the projects are closely linked.

“We were preparing for the TIGER II grants for a long time,” said Christine Kefauver, Transportation Manager for the City of Orlando “We were very excited about what we were hearing from Washington about breaking down the silos between HUD, DOT and EPA and we felt that this project was really an ideal fit for that.”

The new bus-rapid transit extension effort will help eliminate the east-west divide caused by the gash that Interstate 4 cuts across the city and bring increased access to education and job opportunities for residents in Parramore. The existing bus rapid transit will also be able to link to intercity travel options and connect to more neighborhoods.

“The [area] west of I-4 has been seen as underserved and we were looking to bridge under I-4 to bring more cohesion to the community,” said Kefauver, adding that “transit, bicycling and a complete streets approach” are all crucial components to the project.

The bus system’s reputation for quality and reliability is built into the name — LYMMO — a shorthand for “limousine.”

Bill Nelson, U.S. Senator from Florida, said the TIGER funding will “help build the transportation foundation needed to revitalize the Parramore community.”

And, Representative Corrine Brown, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee whose district includes parts of Orlando, praised the funding as a means of helping her constituents and “giving them greater mobility, as well as access to the new jobs and industry that the project will bring to Parramore.”

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series profiling the winners of the US DOT’s TIGER grants on the T4 America blog. For more information about the TIGER grants, view our interactive map and list of all the winners, read the rest of the posts in the series profiling the winners, and read all TIGER-related stories with the “TIGER” tag from the blog.

Clayton County, one of metro Atlanta’s five core counties — Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport is partially in Clayton — will terminate all transit service in 14 days. The transit service, which provides over 2 million rides each year on buses “full to bursting” with riders, according to MARTA CEO Beverly Scott, will shut down service entirely, leaving the 50% or more of C-Tran riders with no regular access to a car stranded.

Public transportation (or anything that provides people with mobility) is really about access. It gives people access to opportunity, access to daily needs, access to a job, access to life — and maybe even the means to improve the quality of that life.

One story highlighted in October in this piece from the Atlanta Journal Constitution shows the vital connection that C-Tran makes for one Clayton County resident:

Twenty-year-old Bridget Milam takes Clayton County’s bus system, C-Tran, wherever she goes. She takes it to Brown Mackie College in Atlanta, where she’s getting an associate’s degree in early childhood education. She rides it to her job at a day care center. She has never had a car and can’t afford one now. C-Tran is her lifesaver. Not for long.

…[she] may have to put school and her day care job on hold. “It means I have to find a job closer to home, in walking distance,” she said. “It would probably be fast food.” …Milam expressed frustration that she will “have to settle rather than doing something that could further my career.”

Access to the opportunity that public transit provides can mean the difference between becoming a teacher one day — or a future of asking customers if “they’d like fries with that?”

Despite a proposal to raise fares dramatically, the deficit was still at $1.3 million, and the 5 county commissioners voted 4-1 last year to shut the service down completely, asserting in a statement that “paving roads is a primary duty of the county. Public transit isn’t.”

The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority disagreed strongly with that view. “In Georgia, local roads are a local responsibility, and local transit is a local responsibility,” GRTA Deputy Director Jim Ritchey told the AJC.

Unfortunately for Bridget Milam and thousands of others in Clayton County who depend on C-Tran each day to get to work, class, the doctor or pretty much anything else, Clayton County leaders don’t see it that way — leaving them stranded at the station come April 1.

If you’ve been affected by cuts in transit service or fare increases — especially if you’re in Clayton County, Georgia — tell us your story and we’ll help share it with Congress.

UPDATED: Like this touching story that Carmen, a now former C-Tran rider, shared with us on that page:

Hello. My name is Carmen and I’ve been a passenger on CTRAN’s paratransit service for as long as they have been in service. I work for Delta Air Lines and use the service to get back and forth to work. At this time, I have to move closer to my job in the Fulton County area. This is a hardship because now I have to cancel my lease agreement with my current apartment complex in order to move. They have been very helpful but I really did not want to move because of the negligence of Clayton County managing the taxpayers’ funds. Not everyone can afford to move at the last minute. I truly hope that Clayton County uses the funds they do have in reserve, as mentioned by Eldrin Bell, to keep CTRAN running. If the Commisioners or their family members were in our position maybe they would look at the situation differently. But of course those that are not affected are not concerned at all and that is a shame they are not here for the people.

Update 2: Read this superb and touching story from the LA Times on the last day of service.

Monday’s online debate on conservatives and public transportation was billed as a back-and-forth on why the ideological right should embrace public transportation. While differences persisted between our conservative and libertarian panelists about the impact of transit investments, another schism developed over how big a role buses should play.

Monday’s debate hosted by Transportation for America centered around the book Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation, written by conservatives William Lind and the late Paul Weyrich.

Lind used his opening remarks to summarize the book and refute the oft-repeated right-wing argument that public transportation requires government subsidies while automobiles and the roads required to support them are somehow a free-market outcome.

“In fact, the dominance of the automobile is a product of massive government intervention in the marketplace,” Lind said, citing decades of federal support for the interstate highway system as streetcars remained privately operated — resulting in crushingly unfair competition. “Conservatives above all people should know what happens when you subsidize one competitor and tax the other.”

“You’re either investing in (both highways and transit) or subsidizing both,” agreed panelist John Robert Smith, president and CEO of Reconnecting America and former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi. “You can’t have it both ways.”

Sam Staley, director of urban and land use policy at the libertarian Reason Foundation, was the designated mass transit critic of the debate, which he conceded was “probably accurate” but in need of further clarification. Staley is skeptical about the ability of transit to drive economic development or result in major lifestyle changes.

“I definitely think that transit has an important role to play,” Staley said, “but I think we need to be paying a lot more attention to the conditions under which transit works and when it doesn’t.”

Staley cited the Washington D.C. Metro’s Orange Line, saying transit has succeeded in dense, developed areas like Ballston in Northern Virginia but is less effective when those conditions are missing in places like New Carrollton, on the Maryland side of the District. (Didn’t the changes along the Orange line in Virginia come about largely due to that transit investment?)

Despite his misgivings about mass transit in general, Staley found himself in the unlikely position of defending buses from Lind’s attacks. Lind argued most Americans “don’t like riding buses” and that only trolleys or streetcars would persuade choice-riders to give up their cars, to which Staley responded: “If we discount buses, we’re really doing a disservice to transit generally.”

The final panelist, American Public Transportation Association (APTA) president Bill Millar, also defended buses, saying the industry is rapidly adopting new technologies like bus rapid transit and dedicated lanes, which will appeal to drivers.

Panelists answered a number of interesting questions from listeners on topics such as public-private partnerships, rural transit needs and winning over anti-tax conservatives. Overall, despite differences over the role of buses and transit’s ability to influence broader change, panelists agreed on the general importance of public transportation and the need to make practical decisions not rooted in partisanship.

Smith put it well: “As mayor, I never found a pothole or a railroad crossing that identified as a Democrat or a Republican.”

If you missed the webinar or want to listen again, you can do that with any of the links below, or on the webinars page:

• Audio/video of session with presenter slides (click to launch in a new window)
• Full audio file (.mp3)
• Full downloadable video file (.mp4)
• Read more about the Moving Minds book.
• Buy the book from Reconnecting America

November’s ballot included seven measures in five states – Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Michigan and Ohio. Voters ultimately approved $74 million for transportation and rejected measures to delay transit projects, most notably a measure in Cincinnati aimed at blocking a planned streetcar line. The pro-transit incumbent in Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory, was re-elected and voters in Charlotte, North Carolina elected transit advocate Anthony Foxx over an opponent who has been less supportive of transportation choices.

Two states – Maine and Washington – rejected initiatives known as TABOR measures. If passed, these would have imposed harsh spending limits on state governments, potentially forcing deep cuts to public transportation.

Starting tomorrow, the Center for Transportation Excellence is launching a free, six-part webinar series aimed at helping transportation organizations and advocates get measures on the ballot and win. The first part, scheduled for Friday, November 13 is themed “Election Trends: Learning from the Past and Looking to the Future.” Future webinars include “Building a Winning Coalition,” “Making Your Message Better” and “Silencing the Naysayers.”

CFTE maintains comprehensive records of transit politics throughout the country. Their website, http://www.cfte.org is a terrific resource.

The Court’s ruling late last week upheld a lower court decision declaring the state’s $3.6 billion raid of public transit funds illegal and ordered that the money be returned to local transit providers.

Two months ago, Transportation for America released “Stranded at the Station: The Impact of the Financial Crisis in Public Transportation,” illustrating the painful cuts transit systems have sustained at the state and local level. The cuts plateaued as unemployment reached 10 percent and Americans were demanding more transportation options, not less.

It is no secret that California has fallen hard as a result of the recession, but the severity of the cuts to public transportation in California was vastly disproportionate to the rest of the country. The reason for this was no mystery: the State was raiding dedicated transit funds every year in order to alleviate other budgetary shortfalls since 2007.

More than two dozen transit providers throughout the state enacted some combination of fee hikes and service reductions, according to our map of transit cutbacks. BART in the San Francisco Bay Area increased its base fare by 17 percent, and many transit systems in Southern California raised fares as much as 20 percent. The County Connection in suburban Contra Costa reduced its bus lines by 23 percent, and rural areas were hit hard as well. The California Transit Association, or CTA, an affiliation of local transit providers, logged 38 agencies facing cuts of some kind in their own version of our transit cuts map.

Last week’s state Supreme Court’s decision helps explain how things got this bad.

Since 2007, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has successfully diverted $3.6 billion from the state’s transit fund to deficit reduction, prompting a lawsuit from the CTA to get the money back. The CTA argued that the raided funds came from gas tax revenues specifically designated for public transit. By refusing to review a lower-court decision in favor of the association, the high court effectively ruled Schwarzenegger’s raid illegal, ending the seizure of desperately-needed transit funds.

This is a huge victory and vindication for local transit providers. Randy Rentschler, director of the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “everyone knows that the state’s in a budget crisis, but that crisis also exists in local governments in part because the state has taken transit money away from local entities.”

The case has broader implications for public transportation as well.

In tough budget years, Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature are constantly looking for places to trim and local governments are an easy target. But money saved is not money earned, as local cuts tend to bite the state later through increased demand for social services and counties being unable to meet the basic needs of their citizens. The decision will hopefully lead to more caution.

Most importantly, California can no longer rob Peter to pay Paul.

But at this point, it remains unclear how much of the original $3.6 billion will be returned to the transit fund, and ultimately, to local providers to preserve vital service for riders. That money is desperately needed, not only because of the millions of Californians who rely on public transportation for their day-to-day mobility, but also because many communities are on the cusp of becoming success stories. Transportation for America’s “Stranded” report profiles how efforts in Sacramento, Orange and Contra Counties have already improved quality of life and relieved congestion, highlighting the need to keep up the support.

This story is told by Transportation for America organizer Will Handsfield, from a recent trip to California for a town hall meeting.

After leaving the 21st Century Transportation for Los Angeles conference, I headed over to the Normandie Metro Rapid stop to pick up the 720 bus.

This is where I met Glennis.

Glennis was expected at work at 7:00.  It was 6:25, and she had been waiting at the stop for 30 minutes when I showed up.  Glennis told me that once she got off at Santa Monica Blvd, she would still have about one mile to walk to get to her job. Her chances of getting there on time were looking pretty slim at that moment, and I could see the worry mounting on her face.

Not everyone has a car to drive, and plenty of people choose not to drive for many different reasons. Millions of Americans just like Glennis rely on public transportation every day to get to their jobs, and thus to support themselves.  If the buses are late (in this case, the rapid is supposed to show up every 3-8 minutes during rush hour), it threatens the job security of hard working people like Glennis.

One of the people I spoke to at Google two weeks ago put it succinctly, “you should have to know the transit routes, but never their schedules” — essentially saying that infrequent transit represents a poor system.  The Rapid bus is supposed to solve this by coming frequently, but for whatever reason, today it didn’t.

I waited for another 16 minutes with Glennis, and waffled with her on deciding whether or not to settle for the slower number 20 bus (pictured), despite the fact it makes many more stops.  We stuck it out and a bus headed to Westwood finally arrived, and I said farewell.

When she left, she had another 19 minutes to get to work, with at least 10 minutes more of bus riding.  I hope Glennis was able to walk that mile in the 9 minutes left.

For Glennis’ sake — and for everyone else waiting for the bus or stuck in endless traffic — we need to do better on providing a safe, efficient, complete transportation system with options for everyone.