Erie Really Needs to Invest In Better Public Transportation Infrastructure
The City’s Residents are Poor And The City Isn’t as “Walkable” and Pedestrian-Friendly As It May Seem
Walkability, Right…
Erie, Pennsylvania is a shrinking town. It used to boast over 100,000 people but as of the last census has now fallen below that. According to WalkScore, a website that measures the walkability and cyclability of cities and towns, the city of Erie has a walkability score of 60. According to this random website, it assumes that the city of Erie is above average when it comes to accommodating pedestrians.
Hostile to Bike Traffic
As someone who has walked through this city myself when I was more physically able to, I can tell you that this data is somehow biased and skewed. The downtown doesn’t even have the appropriate amount of bike racks and places to cycle in either which makes taking a trip even through the central part of town more difficult than it should be.
Top 10 Poorest Zipcode in the US
Then there’s the case of Zipcode 16501, an area close to downtown, which is among the poorest zip codes in all of the United States. The median household income in this zip code is roughly 11,000 dollars a year. More than 90% of the population in the area makes less than 25,000 dollars a year. The public transportation to this area is some of the best in the city but that’s not saying much about the actual public transportation here.
EMTA is Just Not Good Enough, But They Can Do Better
The service is unreliable, the busses run much less frequently than they should, and the price is prohibitive for the people who live in the area. The customer service is also one of the worst I’ve ever seen for a city of any size and their customer relations and marketing teams are nearly nowhere to be found when there’s a legitimate complaint to be made. I wrote a critique and analysis about the public transportation system in one of my first stories.
Spending Money on Crap
The city and county of Erie received $52.9 million over the next two years from the American Rescue Plan signed into law last year by President Joe Biden. Here’s the website to show what their commitment to using the money will be for so far. They recently talked about spending 750,000 dollars on making improvements on a 50-year-old wastewater treatment plant, so they literally want to spend money on crap.
Transit Authority Keeping Up Appearances
No talks are in the works to help improve the city to allow for more bike racks for cyclists, bike lanes to improve safety while riding through the city, or any additional funding for a fledgling metropolitan transit authority that seems to squander money any chance they get without providing any additional value.
They literally built a three-story parking garage in their new facility and moved over a few blocks to a larger space of land just so that they have a little more room to store their fleet of busses, which I would hardly call a fleet at all.
Ways That The American Relief Plan Money Could Be Used
They could use this money to pay and train more drivers so that they could provide more routes or at least provide routes to places that people actually need to get to. Another way they could use the money is by improving existing bus stops.
This city gets cold and the weather is wildly unpredictable and some of the stops on bus lines don’t have a sign or covering from the weather so you don’t know if you’re actually standing at a stop until the bus just shows up and that can be very cumbersome for some of the more underprivileged and needy parts of the community, including the elderly and the disabled.
At Least There’s This, But Even Then…
I’ll give it to Erie though for having a system in place that services these communities specifically called Lift. No, not Lyft, it’s Lift like holding something up in the air above the ground. A person still needs to give at least a day’s notice to have a driver come pick them up and the service is still not 100% reliable as many people report late busses and ones that don’t show up at all when these services are used primarily for doctor’s appointments and other important and essential errands.
Public Transportation Investment is a Major Building Block in Recovery
The city has ignored the fact that public transportation will be one of the best building blocks to getting the city back to being a thriving and successful community again. Places that have efficient and well-funded public transportation systems give their residents a better chance at being able to access the city’s resources better. How do you think that the destitute would be able to get to work and have access to the local businesses? The bus, walking, a bike, even a cute streetcar would be a nice addition.
Making Cosmetic Changes and Ignoring Citizen Voices
The city is dying. Its people are violently poor and dying. City leaders think that putting lipstick on a pig is the way to solve the city’s issues. Dressing the city up and making it look nice for investors and new residents is only going to drive prices up. It also won’t help the existing residents with their financial problems.
Restoring blighted houses and having a downtown development company is great and all for giving a city a better-perceived image but all this will end up doing is driving the prices even higher on residents who are already feeling the pain of the inaction by city officials in solving the real issues.
City council meetings are absolute jokes and spectacles. No citizen voicing real concerns actually gets heard at these things.
Also, the monthly EMTA meetings are by invitation by request through email only and I even personally attempted to get invited to a meeting after I followed their criteria exactly and I just never heard back. I did this twice. Just no attempt to even make this system look at all democratic.
Takeaways from Living in Erie and Pondering the Future
I’m leaving Erie soon. I’ve decided to go back to a place in Chicago that has their public transportation system mostly figured out at this point. This place has done a number on my mental sanity.
I was involved for a while in the Democratic Socialists of America-Erie Chapter led by the charismatic and capable Cole Schenley. Their commitment to improving the city is inspirational and will likely lead to some changes in the future.
For now, I sit wondering if the impact that can be made by the organization will be enough to change the mindset of the leadership and just of the populace here in general. Places like these always seem to be keen on voting against their best interests.
This place voted blue until 2016 when they flipped for Donald Trump, but then went back to Biden in 2020, but this place is still finding an identity, and I wonder if youth, activism, and change will take hold and finally bring some effective change and leadership to the area.
Better investment in public transportation has always been a passion of mine and I’ve always been vocal when it comes to supporting the communities who would most benefit from this change. Making a positive impact in underprivileged and underserved communities makes a positive impact on society. Listen, city leaders and public officials, making investments in the poor may not make you a short-term profit but in the long term, society profits from a more educated, happy, and financially stable community.
