In Rural Illinois, Advocates Are Keeping the Faith in Public Transit

Adam Lach: I really felt like transportation would be super easy. You get people from point A to point B. I was wrong.

Over the course of this series, I’ve spoken with a bunch of public transit administrators to hear about the systems they’re trying to build and expand in cities throughout the Midwest. These conversations have been rich and illuminating, but, honestly, they’ve started to blend together a little bit.

Then came Adam Lach. Our interview takes place in the lobby of a nondescript hotel north of Springfield, Illinois, just off Interstate 55. Adam is wearing snakeskin cowboy boots and sports the most glorious handlebar mustache I have ever laid eyes on. He’s got tattoo sleeves on both arms, and is nursing a White Claw as we talk. 

Needless to say, Adam doesn’t fit the orthodox description of a transit administrator. Then again, Springfield, Illinois, isn’t a place you’d typically associate with mass transit. But here he is, at the close of day one at the Rural Transit Assistance Center’s annual conference, where over a hundred people from all the cities in Illinois you’ve never heard of have congregated to socialize and strategize.

Adam has stepped away from the happy hour upstairs to tell me more about the bus system he runs. 

Lach: I’m the CEO of RIDES Mass Transit District. We serve 17 counties in southeastern Illinois, so all the way up from Clark and Edgar down to Pope and Hardin County. Service area is just under 7500 square miles, which is just slightly smaller than the state of New Jersey, if you don’t count the water.

Adam’s got a massive challenge on his hands. He has to manage the largest public transit system in the entire state by service area for a population of only 278,000 residents. That works out to an average of 37 people per square mile. For comparison, in Chicago, you’d find more than 12,000 people packed into that same area.

Still, Adam maintains that public transit is just as important downstate as it is in the third-largest city in the entire country. But how do communities in rural Illinois go about providing that essential service — and how on earth do they pay for it?

When I asked these questions to people at the conference, I got a lot of mentions of cost management, streamlined operations and fundraising campaigns. But there was also something simmering underneath those conversations, something fervent, something earnest. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, but gradually, it dawned on me: this conference was a church service, too — a gathering of true believers in public transit.

Welcome back to In Transit. I’m Janek Schaller. Today, how advocating for public transit in rural areas can feel a lot like preaching to a faithless choir, especially in the face of dwindling budgets.

Before we get into the weeds on funding, though, let’s establish how rural transit systems usually work. The urban networks you’re probably most familiar with mainly consist of fixed routes, where buses and trains make the same stops, at the same times, day in and day out. But things work a little differently in downstate Illinois, where most communities have relatively few residents who are spread over a large geographic area. Your standard fixed route would never be able to cover that territory efficiently.

Instead, rural transit agencies tend to rely on something called demand response systems, which are sometimes referred to as dial-a-rides. These systems don’t have buses that run on fixed routes or timetables, but whenever a customer located in the service area needs a lift, they can submit a request online or over the phone, and dispatch sends a vehicle to pick them up.

But as Adam was careful to point out, demand response isn’t just rural rideshare.

Lach: We don’t want to have a bus that has one person on it. We’re not an Uber. We’re not a taxi. You know, we want to have as many people as we can, but we have an obligation to serve everybody, even the far-reaching corners of all of our counties, the forgotten folks.

These “forgotten folks” tend to be the people that need public transit the most: those with disabilities, and those above the age of 65. These populations are overrepresented in rural communities nationwide, and Illinois is no exception. 

The transit administrators and operators I met at the conference were highly sensitive to the specific needs of their most vulnerable riders. Here’s Kevin Tavender, a trainer with the Rural Transit Assistance Center, who used to work as a driver for the West Central Mass Transit District in Jacksonville:

Kevin Tavender: We didn’t actually charge the seniors to get on the bus. We would ask for the donation, whatever the fare was, $2 donation, $3 donation, whatever, if they could do it, if they didn’t have it, that’s fine. You’re still getting to where you’re going to go.

If that doesn’t seem like a viable business model to you, you’d be correct. But the West Central Mass Transit District stays afloat because it’s subsidized in part by the federal government. As long as the system can come up with 20% of the total cost of the project through local funding streams, like private donors and business partnerships, the Federal Transit Administration will cover the rest. That breakdown helps sustain programs like WCMTD’s voluntary fare policy for senior citizens, who depend on the buses for trips to the grocery store and doctor’s appointments, but can’t always pay for a ride. 

But directives from the Trump administration might make it more difficult for rural transit systems to reach that 20% mark. On January 29th, the Secretary of Transportation issued an order indicating that state and federal funding for transit projects will only be approved if agencies can prove that there is sufficient local demand for that service. While that does seem like a reasonable requirement, several of the conference attendees told me that the measures that the FTA has endorsed as acceptable demonstrations of that demand, such as transportation taxes and stringent fare enforcement, are decidedly unpopular in rural communities.

The Secretary also mandated that any local and regional projects that fail to align with federal transportation priorities would not receive federal funding. That means that proposals centered around equity concerns, or that address transit deficits for specific underserved populations, such as the elderly, disabled and low-income communities, are likely now on very thin ice. 

But while those populations remain in the minority in rural Illinois, Kevin says that cutting funding for the services they rely on will only isolate those people from the rest of the community. Kevin also bristles at the notion that public transit should be seen as a handicap, rather than an communal asset.

Tavender: I’ve heard that out in the public, you know, ‘Oh, I’m not riding that bus. That’s only for low income.’ … They need to get somewhere, just like you need to get somewhere. They just don’t have the means to do it.

I asked a bunch of people at the conference if they’ve dealt with that stigma, too, and if they had any ideas on how to mitigate it. One of the most interesting responses came from Michael Walk, a rural transit researcher at Texas A&M who flew into Springfield to give a presentation on cost management. Michael acknowledged that there is some truth to the notion that public transit is primarily used by senior citizens and people with disabilities, but he reminded me that the rest of us aren’t as far removed from that demographic as we might think.

Michael Walk: Every one of us will one day be in that population group … It is a need, and it does need to be funded and supported, and it’s, you know, self-interested to keep these systems up and running.

Folks like Adam are mindful of how this almost-selfish thinking can help their service feel useful to rider groups beyond those that have always taken the bus. 

Lach: I want to make sure that we have the transit service for the people that don’t have the option and have to use it, but for people that do have the option, they know that it’s there, reliable, consistent and available. So if they decide they don’t want to drive their car, they can. I mean, I think that’s, that’s the only thing we can do, is provide that service.

Janek Schaller: Because the things that make transit appealing for the folks that depend on it also can make it appealing for the folks that don’t necessarily need to only use it.

Lach: That’s it. That’s, that’s 100%.

It’s about converting the non-believers, which is something Rudy Muzzarelli knows all too well. Rudy, like Kevin, is a trainer for RTAC, but he used to be a pastor. Here he is, talking about one of his professions:

Rudy Muzzarelli: It’s a rewarding career in the fact that you know you’re helping people. I’ve said before in some of the trainings I do, ‘If you don’t care about helping people, you won’t last in this work.’ You’re not here because you expect to make a fortune.

So, is this Rudy, the bus driver, talking? Or is it Rudy, the pastor? It’s hard to tell, right? Both ask their practitioners to be miracle workers, to reassure the doubters and the skeptics and to provide for their community with very few resources at their disposal.

But neither a religious nor a bus service can survive indefinitely without any money. And as funding becomes limited to those communities with “demonstrated demand” for public transit, this congregation will have to expand — and adapt — at all costs. 

For Midstory, I’m Janek Schaller.