Transit is a Small-Town Value

Wexford County in the northwest Lower Peninsula of Michigan has about 33,500 residents across it’s 575 square miles. The WexExpress, the county’s transit system, provided 155,000 rides last year alone... and that number is rising.

Parents use it take toddlers to Head Start programs. Teens take it to class and after-school activities. Adults take it for manufacturing jobs. Seniors take it to get to the doctor’s. All sorts of people take it for appointments and fun trips and rides home from the bar. It's for everyday life.

Carrie Thompson, executive director of WexExpress joined Common Groundwater to discuss the unique needs a rural county like Wexford has, how transit serves them and what challenges still exist. Transit is a small-town value.

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To learn more about the WexExpress and its programs, go to wexexpress.us. To help expand funding for WexExpress and the transit agency that serves you, click here.

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Common Groundwater is hosted by the Michigan Environmental Council and Beau Brockett Jr.

Our music is "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi, arranged by Derek Zhang and performed by Jackson resident Taj Wallace.

Transcript

Transit is a Small-Town Value

[00:00:00] 

Beau Brockett: Hey folks, you are tuning into Common Groundwater, a podcast by the Michigan Environmental Council, where we go across the state and talk about environmental issues that are felt widely and deeply. We talk about the stories around them and some of the solutions to them. 

You are right in the middle of our transit miniseries that we're running, where we're talking about the state of transit across Michigan, the ways that people use it, the ways that they feel about it, and I'm delighted today to be talking about transit in a local context. 

I'm joined by Carrie Thompson, the executive director of the Cadillac Wexford, Transit Authority. Otherwise known as the WexExpress. 

Carrie Thompson: Yes. 

Beau Brockett: Welcome. 

Carrie Thompson: Thank you for having me. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, you're welcome. No problem. And I gotta say, I'm especially excited because, uh, a big change we made in season two, which is just now airing, [00:01:00] uh, is that we wanted to get local this year. Last year we really stayed focused on staying in Lansing and Detroit. And now this is my first venture out of those two cities, and I'm now in Cadillac where we're, uh, reporting live from the WexExpress headquarters. 

Carrie Thompson: Well, we appreciate that. Thank you. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, not a problem. So just to give a quick overview to you and into the folks tuning in, in our past two episodes, we very much talked about transit as a whole across the state. What's working, what's not, it's history, how people feel about it. And I'd love to like maybe put those into the context of WexExpress and the people it serves today. Uh, before we do that though, would you mind talking a little bit about your personal and or professional like, experiences with transit?

Carrie Thompson: Yeah, sure. So actually I have an interesting way that I entered transit, Back in '99. I was going to college and um, I was just gonna do transit for a summer and 26 years later I'm still here. So I actually started my career in '99, and I was at Bay Area Transportation Authority or [00:02:00] BATA in Traverse City.

 I was there 16 years. I did a lot of different jobs for them while I was going to school. Ended up being their business development director. So I help them set up a lot of their fixed routes and specialty kind of, festival things in Traverse City around tourism. Yeah. And then I've been here in Cadillac for 10 years, at this transit.

And so that's kind of my history. 

It's a very unique way to serve your community and you really do feel like every day that you come to work that you are helping people. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. 

Carrie Thompson: And so once you kind of get rolling in that career, it's really hard, uh, to stop 'cause it's very rewarding. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. I'm sure. Yes. You're on the ground, you get to see the firsthand impacts. 

Carrie Thompson: Yes. Yes. 

Beau Brockett: Well, speaking of that, would you mind giving us a bit of, of an overview as to, um, what the Cadillac Wexford Transit Authority is? Maybe a bit of its history, what it's like in terms of the services it provides?

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. We serve all of Wexford County. We do that through demand response services. So, you know, you need a ride, you call us, we send a bus. So we have demand response. We also [00:03:00] do contracted services. We do a lot with community mental health and Hope Network, um, getting people to their workplaces.

We also have a couple of programs that are unique. So we have a program called the New Freedom Volunteer Driver Program. And so we have 15 volunteer drivers, a federal grant, and we reimburse mileage for those volunteers to take seniors, um, veterans and people with disabilities all over the state to their specialist appointments, uh, which has been huge for us.

And then we also have a program called Rides to Wellness, which is a premium service where the passenger pays a little bit more for the ride, but they're picked up in a minivan and we take them to medical appointments in Wexford and Missaukee County. 

Wexford is kind of unique because our neighboring county does not have transportation. Missaukee does not have that. And so we do our best to kind of serve some of the seniors in that area too, when necessary. 

Beau Brockett: , You gave me a tour, uh, before we sat in on this podcast and, um, gave me some of the overviews of, of some of this [00:04:00] particular services you provided, including, those volunteer rides given to folks for medical appointments. I'm very excited to like, get into a little bit more about those specific sorts of services.

You did mention very briefly about, uh, you know, like sort of the makeup of Cadillac and Wexford as a county. Would you mind talking a little bit more about like. What, what, what, what the residents of, of Wexford need in terms of their transportation services and the like? And how does your service provide that? 

Carrie Thompson: So our service provides about 155,000 rides a year, right. Our number one trip purpose at this transit, which is very unique, is work. So a lot of transits, um, it's medical, that kind of thing. So for us, the number one trip purposes work, we have a very large manufacturing base here.

 So we do take a lot of people to their jobs every single day. We also transport a lot of students. 

Beau Brockett: Oh, okay. 

Carrie Thompson: We are moving about 300 kids a day, uh, for school of choice, and then [00:05:00] also, we have a really fantastic partnership with the YMCA, which is just down the road from us.

 They have a grant where they pick up middle schoolers and take them to after-school programming at the YMCA. So they have full use of the Y and they have a grant to pay for that. We pick up about 70 kids a day at the middle school and take them over to the YMCA for afterschool programming, as well as all of the school of choice and taking people home from their games .

We also, do kids out to the ski hills in the winter and all of that fun stuff, with the school. So we try to be very creative and meet the needs of Wexford County to get people to where they're going. We also have a large senior population that rides the vehicles. And they could be going anywhere, you know?

 They could be grocery shopping, they could be going to medical appointments, they could be visiting friends and family. 

And then we also, have, people with disabilities that ride the bus. So we have contracted services. We take people to work at their, um, programs for employment. 

It's, it's a very interesting mix. [00:06:00] We try really hard to be a part of the fabric of the community. It's kind of like a big quilt, right? All patched in. But we do our best to make sure that we're meeting those needs wherever they might be, including, our new freedom, volunteer driver program. So we have 15 volunteers and they do take people all over the state. We do about 600 rides a month for that program. And we are, as a system, like, as a whole system, we are experiencing record ridership. We have the last couple of years with Covid, we took a little bit of a dip, but we have rebounded plus increased ridership. Two Fridays ago we had 900 rides.

A lot of the urban transits are only doing about a thousand a day. Yeah. And so we had 900 rides on a single Friday , and some of that is due to the technology we just recently put in. 

Beau Brockett: Mm-hmm. 

Carrie Thompson: So we put in a brand new rider app and instead of coming from the point of what the transit needs, we took it backwards.

So we went to what the riders need, did some surveys [00:07:00] and said, 'What is it you're looking for?' So we built the experience backwards. They can download an app, they can see the bus moving on it. They get alerts as it's getting closer, um, and they can book their rides, they can cancel 'em, and it's really helped increase ridership in the evenings when our dispatch service isn't here.

Also on weekends, like we've doubled night and weekend ridership since we put the app in, because they don't actually have to call and talk to anybody. It's not that they don't like talking to our dispatchers, but sometimes you're not thinking about booking a ride until after you've gone home, right? From the office and you've cooked dinner and you've done all these things, and then you can go on the app and book even when no one's here. 

Beau Brockett: That's great. Wow. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah, so we're trying really hard to make it easy to use and friendly for anybody. When we first put it in, we had a lot of people that said seniors will never use that. They're our number one user. 

 Seniors want things that are different than seniors did 10 years ago , right? Most of them are pretty savvy with their [00:08:00] smartphones. 

The other thing that's really cool is even if you don't book from the app, if you have the app and you call dispatch and you schedule a ride, you can see it in the app. So you can open the app and you can actually see, like, the last rides you took, the ones you have scheduled in the future, and all those things. So you can manage your trips right from there. And you can also pay from the app, so they don't have to fumble with ticket books and all those things. A lot of times seniors will call us and say, 'Did I book that ride?' Now all they have to do is look and they love that. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Oh, there's so many great things I feel like I could pull out, and if you don't mind, I'd love to maybe pluck a few. First and foremost, just to like maybe hit on the top line, thing that you kind of mentioned: a patchwork sort of approach to transit.

Carrie Thompson: Yes. You have to. 

Beau Brockett: That certainly lines up with, um, what our past guests on the transit miniseries, Ross and Petra, were talking about. How even just from an environmental perspective, right? It may seem strange. Why is the Environmental Council talking about transit so much? Well, it's really like a holistic approach to [00:09:00] numerous environmental problems, social problems, et cetera.

 And I love it from your perspective that, uh, you are having a holistic approach to the community, like a community is varied, and so the systems that serve them ought to be varied as well. I think that's fantastic. 

Carrie Thompson: We always say as transit directors, if you've seen one transit, you've seen one transit, because we are all very tailored to the local level.

So we might get state and federal funding, and then we also get millage money, but we are really tailored to whatever the community is needing. 

Beau Brockett: That's great. One thing I wanted to pull out too was the student ridership. Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that because I grew up in a small town.

I've lived for most of my life in small towns but didn't realize until later on that transit really was at my fingertips for those. I was coming to this conversation, like, imagining that a lot of kids or teens, young adults, would need transit to get to work.

Not all of them have cars or driver's license. So it's so cool to hear that so many are taking it, I'm sure, for jobs, but then I didn't even think about this sort of [00:10:00] school angle of school of choice. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. So it's interesting with schools. I've had a lot of experience transporting kids with schools, and the one thing that I've definitely noticed is this: In a lot of rural communities, if the transit is not transporting school kids, they're not building transit fans.

Beau Brockett: Mm. 

Carrie Thompson: Does that make sense? So a lot of kids in rural areas will ride the yellow school bus and then they automatically assume they have to have a car, right? If you take the transit bus like they do in big cities, right? Just on a regular basis, if you take that bus to school, you automatically have that in your mind saying, 'Oh, I can take this anywhere I want to go.' So that could be school. It could be the beach in the summer. It could be to a friend's house. All of those things. And so really we're building transit fans by moving kids for school of choice and after-school programs because they start to see us as an option. 

A lot of adults will say, 'Well, who's the bus for? And I [00:11:00] think 'Well for everyone.' And if you don't understand then we're not marketing it properly. It's for everyone. So, uh, we even do head Start here. So we transport kids for Head Start as well. 

So it's just a wide variety. It's not like the bus is for one person, it's for the whole community. So even if you are not riding it, you know somebody who is, whether that is, a grandparent or your parent or somebody who can't drive, maybe because of medical issues, or someone trying to get to college or, you know, it's a lot of different people.

It's not just for one per one type of person. It's for everyone. 

Beau Brockett: That's that's fantastic. Yeah. And, and again, I think that builds on something that I've really, have come to realize during my five years at the Environmental Council is that transit is not just for your metropolises of the world , but for every, like it's for everyone in every place. It may look differently but it really is, a universal need and want. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. So we might not have enough density for a fixed route, right? Because you, you don't have maybe [00:12:00] 20 people traveling every 15 minutes from a couple of locations.

 But for demand response, it makes a lot of sense, right? And we still group those trips together and make them as efficient as possible. In a rural community, sometimes you feel like it may be more important because otherwise things are not close together. I can't walk from my house down to the grocery store in a lot of cases in a rural community, because that's 15 miles in some cases. Right? And so that makes a big difference. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Love that. One last thing I wanted to pull out was, something you mentioned early on and then just a few minutes ago, and that was trips, whether they're volunteer based or through the more traditional system that you have of giving, getting people to the appointments they need.

 And I wanted to bring that up because, my mom's side of the family, some of us are up in Alpena. And I know how if you have if you have a specialist appointment, it may not be in Alpena, it may not be anywhere near. And so having that access to go farther south or maybe in farther north in some cases I know is very vital in, in some parts of this state. 

Carrie Thompson: [00:13:00] Absolutely. And we've got a really great partnership with Munson here in Cadillac. So Munson is part of a regional hospital, right? And so they're actually building a surgery center here in Cadillac, and they're kind of the regional hub for a lot of counties around us where people are coming in, and we are working with them on a partnership this summer to move people around from the different hospitals. And so actually going out of Wexford County and into Benzie County where Frankfurt's Hospital is up to Traverse City and Kalkaska and in Manistee.

That's a big deal. Otherwise people just can't get there. 

 And so we're trying really hard to support the hospital and what they're doing too, and they're pushed to become a regional center here. 

You'd be amazed. I actually recently gave a talk to one of the hospital organizations and we just talked about what's possible with transit and they all looked very surprised, like they just hadn't really thought about that. And so I still think there's a lot of growth that transit can make even in these small communities just by making solid partnerships and getting [00:14:00] out there to say, 'Hey, what can we do for you?' 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. And, and maybe that's a great segue into our intermission because I'd love to move into like our second act where we talk about some areas for growth or maybe some areas of struggle where you'd like to see growth.

 Oh, actually I do have one more I want to pull out and it's one that you gave to me on the tour.

 It's about your bus drivers themselves. Oh yeah. Yes. It seems like you have a lot of great amenities for them in ways to combat some of the natural sorts of hardships that bus drivers might have. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. Yeah. So for us, it's really important to keep morale up here. The bus drivers and our dispatchers are really the heart of this organization. And so one of the things that we did for them a couple years ago was put in a wellness center here. And so we have a couple of treadmills and some exercise equipment that were paid for by wellness grants.

They can come in and work out when they're done because obviously if you work a 10 hour shift, that's some sitting, like you're getting outta your seat every time you pick somebody up, but it's still a lot of sitting. And so when they get here on their breaks or at the end of their shift, [00:15:00] they're welcome to work out.

We actually pay them 15 minutes a day to work out to keep them healthy and make sure that they're feeling good. Um, and then we have a program where they can earn additional paid time off if they do 20 hours in a six-month period of additional working out. And so it's all voluntary but it's a very cool program.

 A couple other transits have come and looked at it and starting to implement it. It's really made a big difference for wellness for our drivers. We have less workman's comp claims and lower Blue Cross rates because of it. And so it helps us as a transit manage the budget, but it also helps them stay in good shape, both physically and mentally.

Beau Brockett: That's wonderful. And I'm sure we'll touch a little bit more on the budget as you mentioned briefly there after our intermission. But for right now, we'll let folks take a quick break as will we.

Sounds good. 

Carrie Thompson: Thank you. 

Beau Brockett: Stay tuned. 

Beau Brockett: Welcome back folks. You are tuning into Common Groundwater.

I'm here with Carrie Thompson of the Cadillac Wexford Transit Authority, otherwise known as WexExpress. We're talking [00:16:00] about transit here in a more rural community and all of the benefits it brings to the people here. We started off our conversation talking about the community, the sorts of services provided. I'd like to pivot a little bit and talk a bit more of, like, the present moment at large for transit and then look a bit toward the future. Maybe a way to kind of kick things off is to kind of go back to a refrain that I've been saying and that people have been saying to me time and again on this podcast and beyond, and it's that like, transit is good. People want transit. It just needs to be made a little bit better and, making it better, is something of course, that local authorities and agencies can do. But it, it really is dependent on the structures, the powers that be, that make a lot of the funding possible.

Carrie Thompson: Yes, it's true. 

Beau Brockett: So with all of that in mind, would you maybe. First, talk a little bit about some of the struggles your authority, the WexExpress has had in recent years? 

Carrie Thompson: Sure. Really our biggest struggle right now is sustainable state funding. 

So, federal funding, it's interesting, with [00:17:00] all of the new things going on at the federal level, I get a lot of questions about federal funding.

We're really not that concerned about federal funding. For a rural transit, we typically get 18% [of our budget]. It just stays the same. It's been that way for 30 years, right? So 18% of reimbursable expenses, and there's a lot of rules around that, but. it's 18% of most things comes from the federal level. 

Now, the state level and public Act 51 is the formula that funds roads and the transportation system in Michigan. So by the time it goes from the gas pumps all the way down to us, it trickles out to about 10% [of state transportation funding] into what they call the CTF, or the comprehensive transit fund.

Beau Brockett: Okay. Okay. 

Carrie Thompson: And then we, um, as a whole, as of all the transits, there's a certain amount in there and they divide it up. And so that comes into a reimbursement percentage from the state. We're supposed to be funded at 60% [of our budget]. That's how the original rules were set up. When it came in, it was supposed to be funded at 60% for rural.

We're being funded at [00:18:00] 34%. And our funding has been very flat and they like to call it revenue neutral. 

But you couldn't probably live off the same amount of income you had 20 years ago, right? 

So we are seeing, even though they're calling it revenue neutral, we're seeing our reimbursement percentage for the state drop significantly.

 And at 34% we are at the lowest we've ever had. And next year they're saying it'll be 30[%]. 

So the challenge for us is between those two things [federal and state funds], that's about half of our funding and then the other parts are made up of millages. And so in Wexford, it's about, uh, 18 to 20% of our budget, and then fairs and contracts and all of those things.

And as a real transit, we have to be very scrappy in how we do that. And so we have to go after every contract we can, because that's how we stay afloat, right? 

So with all of those things happening, we're also experiencing record ridership. So we have [00:19:00] less funding. More ridership. And to be honest, um, if I put three or four more buses on the road today, we would fill them.

 We are at capacity because of that record ridership almost every single day. And so sometimes there are no rides in the system to be had. And so we need to, for the community's sake, to expand those to meet the demand, but our funding is not expanding to do that. Yeah. 

And so as our funding is decreasing, it's just putting more pressure on the system, and we really would like to be able to meet all of those needs. It's just getting more difficult every year, and so we really have to figure out how to get sustainable. State funding, the rest of it is pretty consistent. It's just the state's little, like, rollercoaster in funding.

 And some of the new road [funding] packages, when they put it through, a lot of times they will take transit out of that formula . It might seem like transportation systems are getting more money. It's only certain transportation [00:20:00] systems. 

And I'm not saying that the roads don't need additional funding. They probably do. I mean, we all drive on 'em. We see the potholes. The transit drives on them, too, those buses. But we just have to figure out a more sustainable way that transit is also taken care of.

Beau Brockett: Yeah. That's , very astounding to , put it into that perspective where as ridership is increasing for your authority, for your service area. Funds are essentially dropping as a share of the whole, so- 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. And the state had about 40 million rides last year on public transit.

That's a lot of rides. That's really moving a community around. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. 

Carrie Thompson: I mean, literally. 

Beau Brockett: Four times the state's population. Four rides per person. 

Carrie Thompson: You know, and as a country, I think we were at seven, 7.1 billion rides for public transit across the country last year. That costs money to move people, right?

While local communities with contracts and all that, we, we do fill in, but we have to figure out a way for Michigan to be more sustainable with public transit funding. 

Beau Brockett: And it seems like an entirely [00:21:00] feasible, sort of proposition to make too. I feel like on this podcast series, as we've covered other topics, there's two issues that tend to arise when it comes to environmental issues.

The first one is: We had something really good or pretty good, and then it faded away, or was fizzled out, and now we even need to bring it back again. Which is a little bit of the case here where we had really solid funding. And then over the years it's fizzled out. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. 

The other thing that people have to understand is, is that with transit drivers, I can't just hire anyone. 

And I can't compete against McDonald's or any fast food. Like they're out driving and have to have a CDL [commercial driver's license], and have to have all these licenses. There's a lot that goes into it. You have to secure wheelchairs and you're in charge of school kids and all of these things.

There's huge responsibilities, right, as you're moving people around in a vehicle? And we joke that we could train anybody to drive a bus but I have to hire for customer service. You have to have a clean, driving record. You have to have a clean background check. I mean, you can have absolutely nothing on any of those things to get hired here because [00:22:00] we cannot ever take that risk, because we have seniors and kids on the buses and people that are a little more vulnerable. And so we really have to be specific when hiring. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, that is a great point too. So obviously a budgeting problem is first and foremost, but even just the hiring circumstances makes that even tougher as a whole. Yeah. 

One other challenge. I, I will still ask it, but I think it is not a challenge. In fact, I came into this conversation with a question around marketing. You know, I'm a communications person, so I'm thinking about messaging and marketing. I was going to ask if you felt like there was any struggles kind of getting the word out around WexExpress in a more rural community? My thought process was, well, in larger metro areas you'll have, like, fixed route buses. You know, this isn't in Michigan so much, but you'll have subways, places where it's really easy to see transit in action at a regular scheduled time. 

Here, that's a bit less of an option, but based on our conversation, it sounds like a lot of people know and, want to use the service of yours, too. 

Carrie Thompson: They [00:23:00] do, and we try hard to get the word out.

 You know, we have social media pages and we do a lot of interviews and, and that kind of thing, but yeah. And you know, as you look out in the community, you see the buses because I'll have people talk to me about seeing the buses and so I think that part of the advertising makes sense.

It's more, 'Who can ride the buses,' right? That sort of thing. 

And so we have to do a good job of making sure that we say these buses are for everyone. So if you need a ride, pull up the app and book one, right? You don't have to make any special arrangements ahead of time. You don't have to call us at a time. You can just literally pull up the app and do that. And so I think that's really helped us. But yes, I think transit as a whole, they have to continue to do marketing and really put their stories out there because there's a lot of really great stories around what we do and people need to hear those.

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going a little bit off topic or a little bit ramble. But, uh, just to add on to that, I feel like one thing that I've learned is, there's also like [00:24:00] maybe an apprehension of using transit for the first time. 

Once you do it once, you just feel a sense of relief.

Like when I took a bus for the first time, or even took Amtrak for the first time, I was so nervous. And then once you get on, you're like, yeah. 

Carrie Thompson: Oh, it's no big deal. It's easy. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. This is actually very easy. And it sounds like that's even more so with, with your app. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah, absolutely. It's made a difference, but, but you're right. There's always some apprehension. We actually do travel training here because of that. Oh yeah. And so sometimes as people are, learning to use the bus, we will go, we'll meet with them. We'll ride with them the first time we show them how to do things on the app. 

We try really hard to also bring our vehicles to expos and that kind of thing where the community's out and about and they can actually climb on a bus and see um, kind of what to expect.

Because you're right, sometimes people are apprehensive. That's why it's so cool that we have so many students that ride because. As they become adults, they're not nervous about it at all. 

Beau Brockett: That's a great sort of community engagement education hook. That's very brilliant. 

Well, um, we've talked a bit about some of the [00:25:00] struggles that are faced for transit authorities and agencies across the state particularly around the state budget, how it is supposedly revenue neutral when, in fact the funds that it's in a sense sending to, uh, transit authorities has been decreasing over the years. When you think about the future, do you see, like, any solutions that you feel like could work? Is it more of just like we all need to come together and think of a new sort of, uh, transit funding system for the state? 

Or is it really just come down to like, 'We just need more money. Like we just need a more consistent sort of funding?' 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah, we do. We definitely need more consistency. Um, I don't know. So right now they use Public Act 51. It's so large and it's been in place so long that people are afraid to, to really change it.

But there's a couple other things that could happen. So for instance, to the sales tax, the big box stores do on anything auto related. So like if you go to Meijer, Walmart and you buy, wiper blades, that sales tax is supposed to come, [00:26:00] part of it, to public transit, and they've never done a good job of sorting that out.

And so if they did that, they would close the entire funding gap. 

 So just some of those kind of changes where how it was intended and kind of how it ended up, they're not always the same, right? As the years roll passed. I think there's a couple of tweaks that could happen, and we've talked to legislators about that,

and they do know we need more funding in there in a more specific way to say, 'Hey, we need our funding to come in a way that is sustainable into the future, and we can make plans.' It's really hard to plan your budget when you have no idea how much is coming in the next year.

Beau Brockett: Yeah. A little bit earlier I talked about how, the first sort of environmental trend I, I've seen is, we had something good, it fizzles out. I feel like the other one is we create something and we don't change it for decades. I think it's been about 80 years since we created this sort of transportation funding system, if I remember correctly. I'll fact check myself. But 

Carrie Thompson: It's been a long time. 

Beau Brockett: Our trends, like the ways that we move around in this world, have changed [00:27:00] dramatically from the 1940s, onwards. So, making some tweaks, however they may be, whatever methods are chosen, seems to be very common sense to me. 

Carrie Thompson: I sometimes will have legislators say, well, why don't, why doesn't everybody just take Uber? 

Beau Brockett: Oh. 

Carrie Thompson: I'm like, 'We don't have an Uber in Wexford County.' 

We have maybe one person who logs in once a month, you know? Gives a ride or two. We don't have an Uber, so it just doesn't work here and. That's just honestly too expensive for some. And they wouldn't work with the schools and there's no partnerships with, you know, like your senior groups and your veterans.

And I mean, that is one very cool thing about transit is we are definitely a part of the community. And we also help so many different organizations. I don't think people always realize that that's not something Uber, Lyft is going to do. They're a for-profit company and that's what they do, is make profits, right? And, in a rural community, there's just not enough density for them to be here. And so without transit, these people are not getting around. I would have [00:28:00] 155,000 rides that would not have been taken last year.

And those really drive the community and the economy. 

Beau Brockett: Yep. I have a perfect example of this, if I can tell one more story. This morning I took a rental to go up from Lansing to Cadillac. 

Carrie Thompson: Okay. 

Beau Brockett: Uh, partly because I wanted to be able to take, um, uh, transit through Cadillac and on my way back down to Lansing.

 I paid $20 for a two mile trip to the car rental through Uber, which was very nice. But I'm taking a WexExpress from the car rental in Cadillac to here. 

Tomorrow that'll cost me a 10th of that much money to go the same distance.

I think that is proof right there that Uber and those things won't solve it alone, and how inexpensive it is to take public transit. So. 

Carrie Thompson: It is, you know, that's the whole point, right? We have to keep the communities moving. 

Beau Brockett: Yep. Yep, yep. Yep. Yeah. Well I know we're, we're just about at the end of our podcast. 

I'm gonna pose to you a little bit of a [00:29:00] hypothetical. When you think about, like, if we keep transit funding at the state kind of as is versus if we make the investments we need to create transit funding, what do those futures look like? Are they pretty stark when compared side by side to another? 

Carrie Thompson: Yes. Yeah. So if we had the funding we needed, it would mean expansion. It would mean continuing to help other organizations in our communities right? And really keeping things moving and pushing forward in a positive way. If the funding stays the same or decreases. You're looking at cuts, and not just here, I mean, everywhere across the state. And then you have people who are not getting to their appointments. They're not getting to school, they're not getting to college, they're not getting to the grocery store.

Some people, we are their only outlet to get out in the community because they cannot drive. There's a lot of seniors that do not have driver's licenses and cannot get out, and otherwise they would be very isolated. If funding continues the way it is or decreases, you're going to start [00:30:00] seeing specifically rural transits having a lot of trouble staying afloat in the state. And that's a scary thing to say because I know how vital it is, but at the same time it is very true. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah. Yeah. I think all the more reason why it seems so important then that it seems like a lot of agencies, authorities, nonprofits, are coming together to advocate for change, not only in the short term for this year's budget, but for budgets ahead through the state of Michigan.

 That money is going to, to a direct cause that is having very tangible results in each and every community it serves. 

So, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Well with that, then, thank you so much for taking the time today to join me, on this podcast.

Really appreciate it. 

Carrie Thompson: Yeah. We appreciate it too. Thank you for getting the story out with public transit and letting people kind of get a peek as to what we do here. So we appreciate it. 

Beau Brockett: Yeah, you're welcome. And to folks listening, know that we'll have, links to the WexExpress, a bit more of the services that they provide, as well as a link to just some of the more general statewide transit advocacy efforts going on, through the [00:31:00] Environmental Council's website. 

So, um, with that, folks, thanks for tuning in today. Just as a reminder, we are in our transit miniseries here on Common Groundwater. You can listen to any of the episodes within this miniseries in any order, but if you're following date by date, know that we have one last episode coming out where we talk with a more metropolitan transit agency.

With that, thanks again and stay tuned.