LETTER: PVTA SERVICE RESTORED FOR ROUTES 30 AND 31

To The Indy,

I’ve done my best to keep a sense of humor over the past 12+months,
but now that we’ve finally managed to restore late-evening service on
the core bus routes (30 & 31) in Amherst, I’m feeling very serious
relief. Not only do we need to maintain and continue improving public transit
service, but we also need to increase ridership: this can be helped by
informing the public about transit in and around and – at a longer
distance – to and from Amherst.

In that vein, the most succinct announcement of this newly-restored
service is on the UMassTransit TwitterFeed (but please take note: I do
not “tweet.) https://twitter.com/umasstransit

Since we as a community – the Town and UMass and Five Colleges – are
paying for public transit, which serves as an environmentally friendly
alternative to driving and a sustainable supplement to parking, maybe
the Town’s website could have a similar announcement (or at least a
prominent link to UMassTransit’s website) as well as better advice on
how to make use of public transit to get here?

And would it not make sense to promote – and to broadly support –
Amherst as a transit-oriented community?   We’ve been called “The
Number 1 Town” by our hometown folksinger, Paul Kaplan, and we’re
close enough to being the number 1 community in public transit that it
may be worth trying even harder in the future!

Best wishes – and thanks again to the Town Council for listening, to
the Manager and PVTA rep for negotiating, to Town staff for taking my
occasional “what’s happening?” phone calls, and to the folks at
UMassTransit – especially Glenn Barrington – for their continuing help
in bringing this transit improvement about,

Rob Kusner

Editor’s Note: A news story in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on the restoration of PVTA service on routes 30 and 31 can be found here.