Little Rock, AR – I grew up in Durham, NC which was an easy place to get around as a kid. My sisters all got drivers licenses when they were 16 but that wasn’t an option for me since I was legally blind so I walked or bicycled on the relatively empty streets or took the bus.
After graduation, I was ready for adventure so took Greyhound buses and hitchhiked to visit friends all over the country – Illinois, the Northwest, the South, the mountains of New Mexico and California – before landing in Bloomington, IN for Graduate School.
I thought I would be a professor of French Literature but academia wasn’t for me. For a while I was a janitor for an apartment complex in Bloomington while I got a Master’s Degree to teach English Language learners.
Then, in 1983, the 20th Anniversary March on Washington inspired me to take a job in Little Rock, Ark. The only thing I knew about Little Rock was watching Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower on TV intervene in the Little Rock Crisis in 1957.
At that time, I could take the bus to many parts of North Little Rock but the buses ended at 6pm so I would quickly get onto a well lit main drag to walk the 2 miles across the river to get home. We led a campaign for better transit and won an expansion of service that continues until this day.
When a vacancy opened up in Pine Bluff, I moved there and took the bus back and forth on Sundays. There were 2 bus options – Trailways and Greyhound – so I could go in the morning and come back in the evening. Or I’d take the bus to buy groceries on the weekend or go to the local bookstores.
But now, both bus lines are gone and there is no way to travel between the 2 cities except by car. Residents in the downtown area are especially eager to be able to go back and forth again. In addition, there isn’t full transit coverage of every neighborhood in Little Rock and I’ve started to see service cuts and less frequent service.
I work hard every day and depend on transit to get around. In fact, buses have always been part of my life. Like many bus riders I know, I want good routes and full coverage of every part of Little Rock as well as a statewide system of intercity transit.
We need the federal government to do their part and fund transit service as well as infrastructure so that we all have the opportunity to fully engage in the civic life of our community and get where we need to go.