According to the TMP, the first of the “gradual” rate increases was supposed to coincide with the implementation of specified bus service improvements.  That fact is in bold italics in the TMP – to emphasize it.  Here’s the quote:  “The adoption of this Transit Master Plan will direct City staff to implement the fare increase for tickets and passes.  The fare increase should be implemented at the same time as the short-term service improvements are implemented, projected to be July 1, 2010.” (Near the bottom of page “7-5″ of the TMP.)  In the paragraphs directly above this, they discuss how they are expecting ridership to decrease as a result of the price increase, and that having improved bus service coincide with the rate increase may mitigate the loss of ridership somewhat.

The service improvements aren’t going to happen any time soon, but we get to pay the increased fares anyway.  I got an e-mail on June 21st from Mariate Echeverry, Transportation Planning Manager, and she said “City Council has not approved yet the inclusion of Sunday service in any of the routes. We don’t have a timeframe at this point to provide that service. City Council approved some route changes in the first phase of the implementation and those will be in place by the end of this calendar year.”  Paul Van Heden, Transit Commission Vice Chair, e-mailed me the same day saying “The first phase of schedule/route changes should be complete by the end of this year.”  (Note: this information contradicts an article in the Asheville Citizen Times on May 25,  “Asheville Transit holds meeting to address rate increases,” which says City Council approved the rate increases for July 1st,  and also approved funding the service improvements.  If you knew what the TMP said, you would read that to mean the service improvements were also happening when they were supposed to, on July 1st.)  So it’s going to be a few months until we get the service improvements. What’s the problem?  Just run the busses on Sunday.  Just run them until 10:00pm.

Here’s what short term improvements were supposed to start on July 1st:

• 5 corridors gain 30 minute service, and service to 10:00pm
• 6 bus routes get service on Sunday
• 2 additional routes, and 4 service extensions to new areas
• new shelter and sidewalk construction begins

(See the Transit Master Plan, page “ES-3.”  Specific details about each route are on pages “7-6″ to “7-8.”  Note again that page “7-5″ says these “short term” changes were supposed to start on July 1st, and were supposed to coincide with the rate increase, along with the reason they should coincide.)

The Transit Master Plan is here:  http://www.ashevillenc.gov/uploadedFiles/Residents/Transportation/City_Bus_Service/Transit%20Master%20Plan%20-%20Final.pdf (41MB .PDF file)

I knew about the TMP.  When I heard the fares were going up on July 1st I was happy that we would finally have Sunday bus service.  But I quickly found out that probably wasn’t happening anytime soon after talking to a couple bus drivers.  So instead of visions of the new service,  all the problems of the past started running through my head.   These past problems are listed at the end of this article.

Regarding the fare increase,  Asheville justifies this based on what other cities are charging.   They say other cities don’t give such good discounts for monthly and yearly passes.  (See the TMP, pg. “7-5.”)   So Asheville wants to join the crowd of cities that don’t have economical, environmentally friendly public transit. They use those other cities as an example of what to do – raise the rates of the monthly bus passes to match other cities – with full knowledge that raising the rates will cause a decline in ridership (TMP, pg. “7-5.”).

Asheville has stood out from other cities, as is seen in on the “best cities” lists it has been on.  (See http://www.exploreasheville.com/press-room/asheville-quality-of-life-awards/index.aspx and  http://www.mountainx.com/news/2010/060910making_the_a_list for some examples.)  Apparently the current city council doesn’t care about that disappearing, and Asheville just joining the crowd, and being another “stinking, polluted, town” (the song “One night in Bangkok” came to mind).

I would like to see Asheville have FREE public transportation.  It’s the right thing to do.  If the buses were one time, ran every 1/2 hour, ran until 10:00pm, ran on Sunday, and were FREE – people would use it.  They wouldn’t have to pay for a car, gas, insurance, maintenance, parking – and they wouldn’t be polluting the environment and depleting natural resources.  That would definitely keep Asheville standing out as an example.  The Asheville city council just wants to join the crowd, raise the rates to match other cities, and watch in anticipation as their expectations that ridership will decrease come to fruition.

While I was thinking about writing this article, I noticed two posters in the bus about “Strive Not to Drive” – advocating the taking the bus, carpooling, or biking to reduce pollution.  This is from a recent article:
“Get ready for Strive Not to Drive Week”
“We’re thrilled to have this opportunity to share the bus system with our fellow Asheville residents and celebrate a form of transportation that’s economical, environmentally-friendly and community-oriented.”  (The week of May 15-21, 2010.)
http://www.mountainx.com/blogwire/2010/get_ready_for_strive_not_to_drive_week
(Note “economical” and “environmentally friendly” are listed together.  So much for economical.  So much for increasing ridership.  So much for the environment.  So much for “Strive Not to Drive.”)

Here’s a quote from the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s main web page: “Economical and environmentally friendly public transportation is here to serve, connecting people and places in North Carolina.”
http://www.ncdot.org/nctransit/
(Note that “economical and environmentally friendly” are listed together.  So much for economical.  With the expected decreased ridership – so much for environmentally friendly.)

Asheville seems to be known for being environmentally friendly:
- Asheville is on this list as the 25th most environmentally friendly city in the country. (Note that one of the listed criteria is “mass transit usage.”)
http://myefficientplanet.com/tag/most-environmentally-friendly-us-city/
I wonder if Asheville will be on the list in the future.

Here’s another one:
- Asheville is #9 in “The 10 Best US Cities to be in for Earth Day”
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/earth-day-10-best-cities.php
Ditto.

The increase in fares was supposed to be gradual, spread out over 5 years (TMP, pg. “7-5″).  A 33% increase is not gradual.  That’s equivalent to gas going from $2.50 a gallon to $3.33 a gallon in one day.   If they did one price increase every 6 months, 10 times (5 years), then the current increase would only have been $1.70.

More increases are to come. The city wants to cut the discounted rate for monthly bus passes from 62% to 20%.  (They base that on an expected 40 uses of the pass per month.)  That means the monthly bus passes will eventually cost $32.  (This month they were $15, on July 1st they’ll be $20.)  That’s over twice what we are paying now.

When I talk about fares I am not talking about the $1 / ride cash fare.  That isn’t relevant to anyone who regularly uses the bus.  I hardly ever see anyone put money in the box.  They don’t plan to change the cash fare.

If you think my complaint of a $5 increase is ridiculous, maybe you would consider making a donation to the Asheville Homeless Network (IRS 501(c)3 non-profit charity), which tries to provide active members with a monthly bus pass.  They were providing them monthly up to 2 months ago, but there is no money left.  http://ashevillehomeless.org/

Almost the end.

Here are the past problems with bus service I mentioned above:

• Those several days in the winter when the bus wasn’t running, but the cars were doing fine, and there was no ice on the roads.  I called the main transit number one morning asking where the bus was, and the guy acted like I was supposed to know they announced on TV the previous night they would be starting the busses 4 hours late.  It was 7:45am.  I said there’s no ice, and the cars are doing fine, so why aren’t they running to get us to town?  He said the forecast was for ice.  I said well there’s no ice, so where are the busses?  He said “you got out of the wrong side of bed.”  My voice was normal.  That was his attitude.  You actually expect bus service?  I said why aren’t they on standby in case of a bad forecast.  He hung up on me.
• One day I called Mariate Echeverry, the Transportation Planning Manager, and asked her why the busses weren’t running the previous day.  She said they were expecting ice on a couple of the routes.  I said “a couple of the routes?  What about everyone else?”  She said most people get connections elsewhere from downtown and they weren’t going to run the busses downtown when they couldn’t complete a connection.  I said I see nearly everyone get off the bus downtown, and again, what about everyone else?  So you just shut everything down if one bus can’t run.  She had no response.  That was truly ridiculous.   Regarding the busses being delayed in the morning, I asked her why the busses weren’t on standby in case of no ice.  She talked about the city deciding to delay the busses the previous night.  I asked again why they weren’t on standby, and she just repeated herself, not answering the question.  (The problem of bus service starting much later in the morning, even though there was not ice, kept happening.)
• There was no bus service on Monday, April 5th, due to “Easter.”  I complained to several city officials, saying Monday is not a State or Federal holiday, and people need to get to work.  One of them said, “well, the busses annual calender has been available, it shouldn’t be a surprise…” – like that was even relevant, and who would imagine the bus wouldn’t run on a non-holiday.  I wrote the blog “Scrutiny Hooligans” about this, and got a reply from Gordon Smith, who turned out to be a member of the Asheville City Council.  (It’s his blog. I was just searching for places to try to get the word out, and that blog came up on Google.)  We exchanged a few e-mails, and in response to my question as to “why doesn’t the city just say the busses will run” he said that state law prohibits the city from dealing directly with labor unions, and the in between is a management company, and they would have to negotiate a new contract to fix that – but he would push for that to happen.  Amazing.  State law says the City of Asheville can’t tell the Asheville city bus system that they have to run on Monday, April 5th – a non-holiday, when everyone that depends on the bus needs to get to work/town/etc.
  
• The days where a bus is 20-30 minutes late, and it stays that way for several hours.   In other places when a bus is that late, they send out another bus on time to get in back on schedule (so there are two on the route at the same time until the late one gets back).
• On two occasions I was at a stop 5 minutes before the designated time (each route has a few designated times listed for certain stops on the route map), and when I called 20 minutes later I found out the bus had already been there.  When a bus is more that 5 minutes early at a designated stop, he is supposed to sit and wait.  I’ve been burned twice when they didn’t follow their rules, and I had to sit and wait an hour for the next bus.
• The stops that don’t have bus stop signs.  You hear this one a lot.  I’ve been burned by this.  I was at Discount Shoes (I didn’t take the bus there), and called for a ride (it’s an extension you call for, and they go out there) and the driver zipped through the parking lot and left without picking me up.  I called and they said I had to be standing in a specific place way out past the front of the store.  I said “there’s no sign anywhere.”   I was in the area a few months later.  There still wasn’t one.   So they are going to let it happen again.  One day the bus driver griped at a guy who wasn’t standing where he wanted him to at the Farmers Market.   The guy said there’s no sign, and the driver pointed and said “that’s where you need to be.”

The end.

(The opinions expressed in this article do not represent any official position of the Asheville Homeless Network.)

The Down Town Assoc. sent an E-Mail asking for volunteers at the Down Town after five event. I called today to offer my help. I will be there at 6:30 tomorrow. I’m looking forward to meeting other volunteers and the event itself.

The bottom line is that if the Director says A-Hope will no longer provide drinks, that only reflects on her.  It does not reflect in any way on the homeless population as a whole that goes to A-Hope for services.

(This article is my opinion, and does not express any official position of the Asheville Homeless Network.)

As newly elected president of AHN my first goal is to raise funds for monthly bus passes for July.   Our account balance at the moment is $29.

We are contacting past donors to thank them for their past support, in hopes of generating more donations.  I have also begun placing donation jars at local businesses.  I have many goals for AHN in the coming months which we will discuss at the next meeting (2pm Thursday @ Firestorm Cafe).  I hope to serve the Asheville homeless population well,  especially AHN members.

Ted Gammon,  President of Asheville Homeless Network

President – Ted Gammon
Vice President – Jerry Nelson
Secretary – Gina (OK, I forgot her last name again; formerly Braxton)
Treasurer – Tom Milby

For the first time, we have ACTIVE officers who are CURRENTLY homeless and/or chronically homeless. Please give them your full support.

Over the next few weeks, I will be coordinating with them to turn over all accounts and records and give all the information and advice they need or want. Neil has offered his place for storage (we don’t want our records stored in a tent, now, do we?).

I have also “sacrificed” my ASUS Eee PC 901 netbook, which I dearly love, so that our President and Treasurer will have computer access.

I will not be attending the meetings for a while. I need a break. Thank you all for your support and good wishes. And now I can concentrate on my job as Senior Editor for both Eternal Press and Damnation Books LLC, and prepare for my move across the mountains.

Blessings,
Moss

The director was given a written suggestion, written nicely, as to how to improve how laundry is handled.  The suggestion would change a policy that currently encourages people to sleep downtown on Sunday night.  That suggestion was included in a grievance the client filed against a staff member who allegedly intentionally denied information the client needed because the staff member was in a bad mood.   In the written reply to the grievance & suggestion, the Director threatened to ban the client from laundry for a month (for something she carelessly misread), and said  “You are always free to do your laundry elsewhere if you do not agree with our system.”   She did not address the merits of the suggestion.  That’s pretty nice – it sounds a lot like “we don’t want your suggestions, we’ll retaliate like this if you write them, and if you don’t like it then get services somewhere else.”  (In case you don’t know, A-Hope is funded with taxpayers dollars and donations.  The Director and staff is paid from that money, although there are a couple of volunteers.)  The client appealed the reply to this grievance & suggestion.  At both of the available appeal levels, they said the reply to the grievance from the Director was inappropriate and “didn’t reflect well” on A-Hope, that the Director “clearly misread” the part the resulted in her threatened ban, and said the staff member acknowledged some impatience on his part, but they failed to address the merits of the laundry suggestion.  (I should add the the client currently says the staff member he complained about has been friendly ever since the incident.)

Laundry works as follows:  On Mondays, people who sign in on the hour between 7:00am and 11:00am are given lottery tickets, and some tickets are drawn and the winners get a laundry slot for a day during the current week.  (You can only do lottery the first hour you sign in on Monday.)  There are 2 slots for 7:00am and 2 for 9:00am, for each day – Monday through Sunday.  If you don’t win the lottery, you can ask to be put on the standby list.  If someone doesn’t show up to do laundry, they use the standby list, based on who is on there first.  So the people who did lottery at 7:00am are in front of the people who did lottery at a later hour.

The suggestion was that there be separate standby lists for the 7:00am and 9:00am laundry slots.  The people that did lottery at 7:00am and 8:00am would get on the 7:00am standby list, and the people that did lottery at 9:00am or later would get on the 9:00am standby list.  The reason being that people that do lottery earlier CAN GET to A-Hope earlier – because they WERE THERE earlier on Monday.  It was argued that it is not fair that people that can get there earlier on Monday get to use standby at both 7:00am and 9:00am during the week, and they also get priority over people who can’t get there at 7:00am regarding the later 9:00am slot.  Some people take the city bus into town, or maybe get a ride with someone who starts work after 7:00am, and therefore can’t get there that early.  The client also had an alternate suggestion that if there’s a slot open and more than one person checks in at the desk for standby (to see if a lottery winner didn’t show up), then the staff could flip a coin, or roll a dice (or do a mini-lottery) – again, so priority isn’t given to people who can get there at 7:00 and it’s fair (but they’d still have the advantage of trying at both 7:00am and 9:00am standby).  The reason there is a sign-in every hour is that people get there at different times, and you get an hour to take a shower, get stuff out of your storage container, etc.  (You can now sign in again the next hour, which you couldn’t do back when A-Hope used to be open in the afternoon – back then you only got 1 hour in the morning.)

The final/2nd appeal was to the President of the Board of Homeward Bound, who said he read through the appeal, and said “I understand that the initial response to you did not reflect well on the staff and agency.”  In his brief reply he had no response to the suggestion about laundry.  The client followed up on this with an e-mail to him saying “So you don’t have a problem with A-Hope ENCOURAGING people to camp in the city so they can do laundry at A-Hope, when I have a suggestion that solves the problem, and creates no new problems.”  That e-mail was never replied to.  (The appeal was filed by e-mail.)

This appeal was from a few weeks ago.  I checked the laundry list (it’s on the wall behind the desk) on 2 of the last 3 weeks (while I was thinking about writing this article), and on both of those weeks 9 names were crossed off the standby list by Sunday.  There are 28 total slots available during the week, so 32% of the people doing laundry are doing it on standby (the two weeks I checked).  It seems this may be because they just give a lottery ticket to everyone as they come in the door, and some of those people actually have other laundry options available – so they don’t show up.

The existing policy certainly encourages people to sleep downtown on Sunday night to get high on the standby list.  The suggestion of two standby lists would solve that problem, and it would be fair, and it does not seem it would create any new problems.  A-Hope is not interested in listening and changing procedures, or they are not interested in communicating what new problem would be created that is sufficient to justify keeping the current policy.  With this policy, A-Hope is encouraging people to sleep downtown, when they could have a safe, dry place to sleep outside of the downtown area.

(This article is my opinion, and does not express any official position of the Asheville Homeless Network.)

UPDATE:  They have more bread now.

The Carolina Homeless Information Network (CHIN) has updated its website.  There is a lot of good information there.  http://nchomeless.org

Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Coalition Meeting: June 1st at 12:30 at Mission Hospital.

Assurance Wireless – free cellphones: Christiana Tugman has announced she is a go-to person about this program, and she is advocating improvements.  If you have questions about this program, or have any problems with it,  her e-mail address is ctugman@goodwillnwnc.org  She is not affiliated with Assurance Wireless.

NEW National Call Center for Homeless Veterans: 1-877-4AID VET (1-877-424-3838)  “…to ensure that homeless
Veterans or Veterans at-risk for homelessness have free, 24/7 access to trained counselors.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255) is a 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide prevention hotline available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.
—  Moss has a few key chains with this phone number, issued by Veterans Affairs, if you would like one.  (Use the “Contact” link at ashevillehomeless.org)