Duluth Public Transportation Rides to the Rescue

By Drew Digby
August 2010

Come January, the city of Duluth plans to raise its bus fares by about 20 percent. The reason isn’t to pay for a budget deficit at the Duluth Transit Authority (DTA). Instead, the idea is to help people get and keep their jobs by expanding service and accessibility.

The fare increase is part of a larger look at transportation issues and poverty, where local organizations have been pushing for long-term solutions to poverty by helping low-income residents find and keep jobs and by improving the elements of daily life of those struggling with poverty. It’s one of the first concrete steps that Duluth is taking to implement its comprehensive Prosperity Agenda, designed to build prosperity for the whole community by looking at specific steps to move people up the economic ladder. One of the goals of the Prosperity Agenda is better coordination between agencies to align resources to solve problems.

The intent is to assist working people who earn just above the federal poverty level but are struggling to work themselves out of poverty. One element in the city’s Prosperity Index is that of reducing the number of people at or below income levels of 200 percent of poverty. Those in the 100 percent to 200 percent of poverty income levels are typically described as the working poor. For a family of four, that would include an annual income of less than $44,100. (For statistics on Duluth’s poor, see Table 1.)

As anti-poverty agencies worked together and did substantial local research, they found that a breakdown of the family car was a huge problem in a city like Duluth, which, at 87.3 square miles, is Minnesota’s second-largest city in territory — spread across more than 20 miles from the North Shore to the Fond du Lac neighborhood.

Community Action Duluth created a Transportation Action Team, which has included representatives from the Metropolitan Interstate Commission, the regional Metropolitan Planning Organization, the United Way, the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), the Duluth school district and the DTA as well as some low-income participants in Community Action programs.

Some of the team’s findings:

• The job market in Duluth has changed dramatically over the past 10 to 15 years, with fewer manufacturing jobs but dramatically more jobs in health care (see Table 2).
• Some job fields with high turnover rates have stayed fairly consistent, such as food service, accommodation, and business-support services like telemarketing. But those jobs present continual challenges to the working poor because of scheduling crises in child care and transportation.
• Transportation and child care issues ranked as very important among residents struggling to get jobs and keep jobs.
• The location of many low-income residents has moved within the city, with more living outside the traditionally low-income Central Hillside neighborhood, which has relatively good transit connections. More now live in neighborhoods further west, and these areas often require a bus transfer downtown.

The first idea for the group was to copy a program that has worked in other cities: help working individuals acquire a reliable used car at a reasonable price. Using grant support, the program helps individuals find a car (which is checked over by an independent mechanic) and get some support for the down payment.

Requirements of the program include:

• A steady source of income and the ability to make payments
• Ability to provide a minimum down payment
• An income within program guidelines
• A driver’s license
• Ability to meet basic credit standards, including not being behind in child support payments

In addition to helping participants find a reasonable car, the program also offers financial education and individual support.

While the program has now helped dozens of families, the next step involved helping a broader segment of those trying to find work. As part of the Jump Start program, Community Action hired a transportation advocate who has been working on broader policy issues that will help residents find and keep jobs. Some of those policy issues have included:

• Pushing for a policy of “Complete Streets,” in which streets in Duluth are designed for all users, including transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists as well as car drivers. That would help low-income residents walk and use transit more easily.
• Advocating for Head Start participants hurt by budget cuts that have eliminated bus service to Head Start programs.
• Working with local community development agencies to make sure neighborhood redevelopment plans make daily transportation needs simple, such as getting to and from child care, buying groceries, and getting to work.
• Working to get residents and the city of Duluth to clear snow off sidewalks in the winter. Snow-clogged sidewalks make walking and transit use more difficult and cause more residents to need a car for winter transportation.
• Working with the DTA to provide better transportation service to workers who don’t work traditional Monday-to-Friday daytime hours.

As part of the focus on transit, the Transportation Action Team has analyzed the location of low-income housing, child care, and jobs. DEED has provided the group with the addresses of every entry-level and semi-skilled job posted on Minnesotaworks.net within the city of Duluth in 2009. An analysis of the data by the Metropolitan Interstate Council found that more than 90 percent of the jobs posted fell within walking distance, defined as three blocks, of a bus line.

Yet the lack of bus service to jobs was a primary complaint received by the DTA and others. Community Action has now researched transportation issues among low-income residents as part of a survey of residents who use their free tax preparation service each year. DTA’s own research on the issue found that the timing of bus service was the problem and came up with a proposal to add more service later in the evening (as late as midnight on some routes) and to add weekend and holiday service in exchange for the 20 percent fare hike.

Under the new plan, the DTA hopes to serve workers who might work an evening shift at the mall and need a ride home, or who work irregular hours in health care, food service, and other service occupations. In addition, by providing service later in the evening, workers starting overnight work can get a ride to work on a late night bus and then take traditional morning-service buses home. The plan also adds holiday service for the first time in Duluth. All Duluth buses are also handicap and bicycle accessible, which provides more options for more people.

As a result of the emphasis on the issues of transportation and jobs, some of the community development work has refocused attention on making more self-contained neighborhoods. If a parent needs to drop a child off at day care, having that day care close to the residence makes the parent’s daily routine that much easier. The focus also raised questions about grocery shopping and the reliance on convenience stores in a city as spread out as Duluth. A related Community Action project called Seeds for Success is developing a network of community gardens and is discussing the possibility of more widespread farmers markets or other ways to provide better access to healthy foods to low-income residents with transportation limitations.

For now though, moving forward with the Jump Start program and the DTA service increases are concrete steps. The DTA received more than 100 comments on the fare increase, with 90 percent of them in favor of the service increases. The city council is expected to give final approval to the changes in the near future with new service to start on January 1.

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