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“It can be frustrating to go from [the bus ride’s] craziness to being behind the wheel and taking someone else where they need to get and being on a schedule,” says the 51-year-old driver, shading his eyes from the searing sun at a Mid-City transit stop where he awaits his third and final bus of the morning. Before Hurricane Katrina, buses came more frequently, he says. “I could’ve stayed in Waynesboro”—the Mississippi town to which he evacuated after Katrina. “I’d miss New Orleans, but I wouldn’t have to be waiting so much.”
Tilquit’s maddening commute is not unusual. One of the difficult truths America learned when Katrina’s floodwaters receded is that a sizable chunk of the city’s population—one in four according to the 2000 census—lacks access to cars, filling the worn plastic seats of buses and streetcars instead. Even before post-Katrina revelations, however, it was no secret that the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) lacked the resources to transport its riders reliably, many of whom worked in the hotels, restaurants, and hospitals at one end of the city’s sprawling 350-square-mile footprint and lived at the other. Riders would be held captive in the thick hot heat of summers, waiting hours at a time for a single transfer. On rainy days, entrepreneurial peddlers worked the crowds of soggy commuters at the uncovered bus stops, selling umbrellas held together with electric tape.
The storm and the resulting exodus only exacerbated the RTA’s woes. After flooding destroyed 200 buses and miles of streetcar track, the RTA had to deploy aging commuter castoffs from other cities. The city’s historic, olive-green streetcars became no more than a symbol used by the city’s tourist board. Riders who could afford to buy or borrow cars began to do so. Others took up biking or walking. Many did not return.
Three years after Katrina, the 124,000 daily riders who fed the system the coins it needs to keep running have dropped by 75 percent, to 31,000 daily riders. The RTA now finds itself caught in a chicken-or-egg conundrum, funded by a combination of farebox returns, local tax revenue, and federal grants tied to a large ridership. Until more people return home to New Orleans, the city can’t improve the transit routes to get them there. “The number of lines we have and how often we can afford to run them depends on population trends,” said Rosalind Blanco Cook, spokeswoman for the RTA. “Our ridership base has not returned to the city. You can’t send out a bus for two people.”
When the St. Charles streetcar rumbled back to life last November, marching bands played under the enormous oak trees lining its 6.5-mile path. Locals and tourists alike heralded the return of the iconic 1920s-era trolleys as a sign of the city’s rebound. There has been no such celebration for the city’s fleet of aging, mismatched commuter coaches. With their meager air conditioning, sweaty seats, and roundabout routes through the city’s poorer, out-of-the-way neighborhoods, buses in New Orleans have long been the province of the poor and working class.
Nowadays the ragtag fleet consists of only 150 vehicles, not all operational. While half of the city’s public transit routes were running again by February of 2008, only 19 percent of pre-Katrina buses were back in service, according to the Brookings Institute. That meager number could have fatal consequences: in June, city officials said that New Orleans could come up short on evacuation vehicles if a Category 3 or stronger storm hit. As many as 25,000 people may need help evacuating from the city, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a contract in place to transport no more than 9,000 people out of the city by Amtrak train. With the RTA’s fleet at its current shrunken size, the city would have to compete with wealthier cities to contract private buses, says Matthew Kallmyer, deputy director of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness. “It turns into this money game,” Kallmyer told The Times-Picayune in June. “And it shouldn’t be because lives are at stake.”

While half of the city’s public transit routes were running again by February 2008, only 19 percent of pre-Katrina buses were back in service.”

Repairing the fleet, however, is an uphill battle against limited funding sources. “What we have in this city are federal funds that have to be used to serve low-income people or fight poverty,” says Jeff Thomas, a special assistant to New Orleans Recovery Director Ed Blakely. “It’s difficult to prove that transportation projects serve low-income people.”

The redistribution of lower-income populations away from existing bus routes will make it that much harder to prove. The loss of a third of the city’s pre-storm population—from 454,000 to an estimated 308,000, according to local demographer Greg Rigamer—has left vacancies of all kinds across the city. But nowhere is the population bleed more evident than at the empty bus stops just outside the recently razed public housing developments that were, until Katrina, home to 5,000 families, a large portion of whom depended on the city’s public transit system to get to school or work. No one knows what these overgrown demolition sites will look like in five years—or if the bus will still stop there.

Regional transportation analysts, the city, and the RTA say the agency is working to adapt to post-Katrina settlement patterns. “The system that is coming back will definitely be a different system because there is a different population we are serving now,” says Cook. “There are no longer the housing developments that were there before the storm.”

The RTA and the city agree that when and if the system expands, the new routes will serve the 17 sections of the city designated as target zones where developers can earn tax credits for building mixed-income communities and homeowners are eligible for city-sponsored buyers’ incentives. “The goal is to connect up our target system with feeder buses and larger carriers to fit in with the schools,” says Ed Blakely, the city’s recovery czar. “We want a mix of people on the buses.”

It will take another three years to get the target zones off the ground, Thomas estimates. In the meantime, bus riders will wait. It’s something they’ve learned to do.

This article appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!