Surely, Sta Can Do Better Than This

When Spokane Transit Authority assigned a bean-counting, out-of-town consultant to redraw its bus routes in a ruthlessly cost-efficient manner, it overlooked just one thing. Good managers don’t just count beans. They know the customers - and listen to them.

At the moment, some of STA’s customers are howling mad.

What’s more, they have raised valid concerns.

Fortunately, STA has shown in years past that it can respond to criticism by going back to the drawing board. It did so several times in the development of its downtown transit center. It needs to do so now.

STA is to be commended, certainly, for reconsidering its route structure. Its consultant used ridership data to determine where the greatest demand is. Lines on the map were moved and schedule changes proposed in an effort to serve the data more cost-efficiently.

Nice theory. But STA’s customers aren’t data, they’re people. Many of them are elderly, disabled or poor. And maps don’t show everything there is to know about routes. They don’t show the streets that are dark, steep, narrow or poorly plowed in winter, although these qualities are important if the question is whether an elderly woman can walk to a bus stop that suddenly has become more distant.

Ridership data and street maps also fail to show which neighborhoods contain needier people who are most likely to be dependent on the bus for transportation. Maybe that’s why STA’s route changes would mean less service to the East Central neighborhood. Maybe that’s why the new routes would provide better service to glitzy shopping centers but would be more distant from places where STA’s most dependent customers need to go - such as medical clinics, apartments for the handicapped, the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery and St. Vincent de Paul’s food bank and secondhand store.

STA is a valuable component of the network of educational and social-service agencies that supports the young and the less fortunate. Old men use it to carry cheese home from the food bank. Frazzled, bruised young moms use it to drag wailing kids to an emergency shelter. These things are important.

Maybe STA can make its routes and schedules more efficient. It’s a great goal.

Now, though, it’s time for the agency to shove the bean counters aside and design a route schedule that balances mathematical efficiency against STA’s role as a provider of service on which real people depend - people who often are vulnerable and forgotten. This will be difficult. But it’s worth doing, as long as it’s done with the responsiveness that STA has demonstrated in the past.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board