Central Florida is one of lowest-wage major metros in America.
As such, we’re a community full of workers desperate for public transit.
After all, people who clean hotel rooms and clear tables, barely making enough money to cover their rent and grocery bills, don’t have enough left over for car payments.
Yet with all that demand for public transportation, would you like to guess where Central Florida ranks on the Census Bureau’s list of the 50 U.S. cities with the highest percentage of transit users?
We don’t even make the cut.
Fewer people use public transit here — in both percentage and raw numbers — than Milwaukee, a region with nearly a million fewer people.
And it’s not because there isn’t demand.
The Lynx bus system runs around 300 buses a day. Lynx CEO Edward Johnson says he could run 500 without breaking a sweat.
But Lynx can’t run 500. Lynx will never run 500 unless it’s properly financed with some sort of dedicated funding stream.
The reality is that Lynx is under-used because it’s under-funded.
Leaders know this. They’ve long known this.
“You have to look at some dedicated funding source for the future,” an Osceola County commissioner once said. “That’s the only way to solve it.”
That quote appeared in the Orlando Sentinel in 1993.
Yet local leaders have done nothing to address this admitted problem. So Orlando remains a region big on talk and short on action when it comes to buses.
I mention all this because Lynx is under fire right now.
As the Sentinel previously reported, board members of the bus agency that serves Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties are questioning the leadership. Union workers are demanding the CEO’s ouster, saying employee morale is low and the system could be operating better.
That may all be true. Maybe new blood is needed.
But I’ll submit this is lot of screaming about the symptoms of the problem — with too little attention paid to the cause.
You could bring in Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Sheryl Sandberg to try to run this bus system. If you don’t provide them with enough money to run enough buses, you’re still going to have problems.
Said Johnson: “We’ve been managing the organization the best we could with the resources we have.”
Lynx has long been neglected.
SunRail is the shiny new toy. But Lynx carries 14 times as many passengers as SunRail every day — 77,000 passenger trips — a population bigger than Winter Park, Maitland and Eatonville combined.
Buses aren’t glamorous. But they’re effective. And they get cars off the road.
I once asked a nonprofit leader who spends his life serving the working poor: If you could wave a magic wand and do one thing to help this low-wage community, what would it be?
“More buses,” responded Eric Gray of United Against Poverty. “Lots more buses.”
Right now, Lynx has so few buses, there aren’t enough direct routes. Many require riders to make transfers and ride as long as 90 minutes each way to get to their jobs.
See, in some ways, public transit is a subsidy taxpayers provide for employers who don’t pay their workers enough to live on. If companies don’t pay their workers enough to afford cars, the public pays to shuttle them to work.
I think that’s flawed — that the businesses who most rely upon public transit for customers or employees should step up.
That already happens in a few cases. Disney subsidizes three Lynx routes. Rosen Hotels & Resorts subsidizes another. There should be more.
We also need dedicated funding. There has been talk of raising sales or gas taxes. I don’t think we need to raise either. We already have a steady stream of money — $280 million a year in hotel taxes.
Right now, we spend that money on things like continually expanding our convention center. What do we need more? Another 500,000 square feet of floor space at convention complex that is already 7 million square feet? Or more buses to help keep the convention and hotel industry running?
We also need that money for SunRail — unless local taxpayers want to cough up more for that as well.
Ideally, Lynx and SunRail should be combined into one regional transit agency.
Members of Lynx’s board of directors (five representatives from the three counties, the city of Orlando and the Department of Transportation) seem to know this. They also seem to know a dedicated funding source is needed.
But leaders in this town have claimed to know that for the last quarter-century.
Until they actually make that happen, the system will never work the way it should — the way it works in other communities — no matter who’s in charge.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
