Bus volume changes for a good reason

In reference to Chris Cargill’s guest opinion (“STA gets too much tax revenue for service provided,” Sept. 3): I retired from STA about a decade ago, so I can’t speak to his assertions or his statistics, and I don’t know if he rides the bus, but I do recall that there were complaints about empty buses during my 19-year career driving transit buses, mainly by people who did not ride the bus.

What many of the complainants did not know was that buses arrived to, and left from downtown Spokane mostly full and arrived mostly empty, to the end of the line, because they dropped passengers along their routes and only gradually picked up more on their way back in.

While there have been huge drops in ridership during the pandemic, conventional wisdom suggests that might be a temporary situation?

Philip J. Mulligan

Spokane