Around 80 people showed up at the Capital Transit public meeting at University of Alaska Southeast yesterday. Only one person spoke favorably about proposed changes to the bus plan, which includes taking away service onto the university campus.
Tasha Hansen is a student at University of Alaska Southeast. Several years ago she was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and a couple neurological conditions. She now gets around in a wheelchair. Hansen relies heavily on Capital Transit most of the year.
“I’m not even sure what to say. With these changes, getting to and from school – it’s going to make it hard,” Hansen says.
Capital Transit is proposing eliminating service onto the UAS campus. Instead, bus service can be accessed on Back Loop Road. This change is supposed to save three minutes each way on the schedule.
Hansen says her wheelchair can get to Back Loop Road via a paved path when it’s not icy. But she feels safer waiting on campus versus on the side of the road.
“Already being disabled, I’m kind of leery of being that close to traffic,” Hansen says.
Others at the meeting lamented losing express service from downtown Juneau to the university. A faculty member says she’s in a one-car household and finds commuting on the bus convenient:
“But with now having to walk an extra third of a mile, having to transfer on my way back and being maybe not able to make the transfer at the skate park due to the times, that convenience factor is completely lost, and I think that will be the case for a lot of employees here and I think that’s very sad.”
Several at the meeting said the proposed plan doesn’t take the needs of people with disabilities into account.
Thomas Smith lives at St. Vincent de Paul housing on Teal Street, a block away from the Nugget Mall. This is the bus stop that he and the roughly 100 other residents access. Under the proposed plan, the bus would no longer stop at the Nugget Mall. The new transfer stop would be at the Pipeline Skate Park.
“It’s hard enough for me to get my wheelchair to the present stop. If you’re going to move it a mile away, you’re disfranchising me,” Smith says.
The city’s Public Works Director Kirk Duncan is overseeing all the Capital Transit public meetings. He encouraged everyone who spoke to submit comments in writing, either on comment sheets provided at the meeting or through email.
Some at the meeting were confused about why oral comments weren’t being taken into consideration. UAS employee Gloria Merry says she’s disappointed.
“I was under the impression that this was supposed to be a public comment period and then I come here and find out they’re not actually taking comments and we still have to submit written comments,” Merry says. “If they’re not listening to these, how much are they actually going to listen to our written comments?”
According to pamphlets being distributed around town and on the buses, the public meetings are available for asking questions and commenting.
Duncan says he will show all written input to the Assembly at a Dec. 8 work session.
“What I plan to do is take all these comments – they’re going to be verbatim comments – and categorize them and hand them to the Assembly. I don’t plan on filtering this stuff,” Duncan says.
So far, the string of public meetings this week has been well attended, he says. Duncan has already received more than a hundred written comments and anticipates getting a couple hundred more.
Capital Transit has two more public meetings on the proposed bus changes – noon today at the Mendenhall Valley Library and Saturday, 1:30 p.m. at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School Library.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said the Assembly work session is on Dec. 9. The Assembly Committee of the Whole meeting is actually on Monday, Dec. 8.
