To most of the passengers on the No. 7 bus Monday afternoon between downtown and South Iowa Street, there’s no question the city’s bus system is a rousing success.

Without it, they say, they simply wouldn’t be able to get around town.

“I wouldn’t go nowhere,” said Eunice Ebert-Stallworth, who doesn’t have access to a car. “Or I’d take a taxi, in case of emergency.”

For city officials, it’s a little harder to define success. Though the Lawrence Transit System is showing “slow but steady” progress, they still aren’t sure how to know if they’ve hit the target.

Monday was the second anniversary of the day city buses began rolling across Lawrence. Transit officials said the system now was carrying roughly 800 passengers a day – an increase of more than 200 passengers a day from a year ago.

Karin Rexroad, the city’s transit administrator, said such growth might be the best way to measure the T’s success.

“We feel like we’re making it, because we’ve had continuing improvement, continuing increases in ridership,” she said. “As long as it’s going that way … I’m happy.”

City Manager Mike Wildgen agreed.

“There are different ways of measuring success,” he said. “If you see 800 people a day using it, who don’t have transportation, who use it to get around their life, then it’s successful. Not everybody uses the fire service, but you wouldn’t say that’s unsuccessful.”

Still, officials acknowledge the city has a long way to go before they can say the system has arrived.

System useful

Rita Zeller-Reed, driver of the No. 7 bus, said people had all sorts of reasons for taking the T.

“I’ve had people get on here because they’re going to have a baby,” she said. “I’ve had kids get on here because mom’s in intensive care and this is the only way to get there.”

Most of the other passengers on the No. 7 Monday afternoon had no other means of transportation. As a result, the Community Drop-In Center offers tickets to poor and homeless who need help getting to new jobs. Zeller-Reed estimated nearly 80 percent of her passengers are regulars.

“They come back every day,” Zeller-Reed said.

Those hard-core regulars, though, don’t translate into much revenue for the T. Over the last year, the system generated $122,165 from fares, about 4.3 percent of the T’s budget of $2.8 million.

Officials say the T will never break even, that there will always be tax subsidies. Transit experts say it’s unreasonable to expect otherwise.

“No transit system in the world turns a profit,” said Rosemary Sheridan, spokeswoman for the Public Transportation Partnership for Tomorrow in Washington, D.C. “That may be a stretch, but there are very, very few.”

Ridership increasing

Ridership is an easier standard to judge the system’s success. The 800 passengers a day translated to 5.82 passengers per revenue hour on the system, Rexroad said. Officials had set a goal of 5 passengers per revenue hour by the end of 2002.

The goal for 2003 is to carry 7 passengers per revenue hour, she said, roughly 1,000 passengers per day. And the industry standard is nine to 12 passengers per revenue hour, or at least 1,200 passengers per day on the city’s eight routes.

“We’ve got a big job ahead of us,” Rexroad said.

Sheridan said Lawrence officials should wait awhile before judging the T’s success.

“We feel it takes from three to five years for a service to reach its maturity, for people to know about it, to work the bugs out, for people to embrace it,” she said. “That’s the rule of thumb. Particularly if there hasn’t been transit in your area, that number’s closer to five years than for three.”

Officials say they’re working hard to build ridership. They say the new bus shelters installed this year have made it easier to use the system, and they plan on installing more signs along routes so potential passengers better understand how they can use the bus.

The T must begin to reach beyond its core passengers to continue to grow, Rexroad said, so people who do have cars decide to take the bus instead.

“I think our biggest challenge is addressing the riders of choice, getting them to try the system, understanding the benefits of the system,” she said.

That will be difficult, Wildgen said.

“I think unless gas gets up to $4 or $5 a gallon, not many people will give up their car to ride it,” he said. “But we serve a lot of people who don’t have other forms of transportation.”

It is those people, Mayor Sue Hack said, who will sustain the city’s commitment to the T.

“I think it’s making slow but steady progress, and I think the community has shown its support,” Hack said. “There are people who need it and use it. I don’t think there’s a will on this commission to pull the plug on it.”