To the editor:

I’d like to help dispel a myth about public transportation, that it pays for itself. It doesn’t — not in Lawrence, Topeka, Chicago or even New York City. It is a city service, a piece of a comprehensive transportation plan that incorporates the mix of pedestrian traffic and vehicles both motorized and non-motorized that future fuel supplies, pollution levels and increasing population levels will demand. I commend the City Commission members under whose watch the T was brought into being.

I’d also like to dispel a myth about the T’s riders. It is elitist and insulting of Fred Whitehead (Public Forum, June 25) to assume that people who ride the T are not “stable, working, taxpaying.” In fact, for many, the T is their stability, their way of commuting to work. Neither is it Mr. Whitehead’s place to decide who is “truly needy” of public transportation in our community.

In their current state, the taxi companies in Lawrence couldn’t possibly meet the demand for service that the T already manages quite well. And as for Mr. Whitehead’s suggestion that the city’s “needy” could make use of other “more sane methods” of transportation, I can guarantee him these “methods” would require that all taxpayers — those who already use the city’s bus system and those who do not — chip in to pay for it.

Kelly Barth,

Lawrence