About 300 angry bus riders attended a meeting last week on drastic cuts proposed for Westchester County’s Bee line bus system.

Along with riders and bus drivers, Westchester DOT Commissioner Larry Salley, Yonkers city council members, county elected officials, and State Assemblymember Mike Spano were in attendance. The elected officials assured the raucous audience that they would work to stop the bus cuts. Bee-Line is facing a $1.6 million budget gap this year, a number Salley says may triple by 2005. A new contract between the county and Transport Workers Union Local 100 must be negotiated in early 2005.

Many riders wanted to know why drastic cuts were proposed just months after a 25-50% fare hike. "Where did our fare hike go?" one rider asked Salley. "Aren’t you supposed to predict a deficit and stop it from happening?" According to the Journal News, 7,000 of the 55,000 daily riders will be affected by the cuts to 44 bus routes.

Salley said the system’s insurance, labor, and health benefit costs have skyrocketed in the past few years. Focusing on Nassau County’s Long Island Bus, he said current state transit allocations are distributed unfairly. It is still unclear how other county bus systems are dealing with similar increasing health, labor, and insurance costs.

But Salley is right that Westchester gets less state transit operating assistance than Nassau. A NY Public Transit Association analysis shows Westchester received the second lowest amount of state revenue per passenger of any New York transit system during 2002 and 2003. New York City Transit subway and bus riders got the least state assistance at $.49 per passenger. Metro-North and LIRR get the most at $2.64 per passenger. Syracuse and Albany bus systems also do well, at $2.18 and $2.10 per passenger, respectively. Westchester gets the second least at $.85 per passenger, followed by Nassau at $1.08.

The meeting was organized by Greenburgh Supervisor Paul Feiner and bus commuters. A public hearing on the bus cuts will be held February 10 (see calendar section). 

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