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Keep Ypsi Rollin

From ArborWiki

Keep Ypsi Rollin is the grassroots effort by local Ypsilantians to preserve bus service in Ypsilanti. The effort was triggered by an announcement that transit funding was to be phased out because of the City's ongoing budget woes, and first sought to make visible the importance of bus service to Ypsilanti residents. Thousands of signatures were gathered on online and paper petitions, which were presented to the City Council. This show of support served to open a dialogue on methods of preserving the bus service.

With a $170,000 payment from Ypsilanti to AATA at stake, several tactics have been discussed, and are at various stages of implementation:

Ypsilanti's City Council and the Ypsilanti Township Board have expressed their support for a fare increase to $1.25 on the Ypsilanti portion of the system. AATA has expressed their willingness to pursue this, and estimates that it would provide $50,000 in additional revenue annually. Further increases would be likely to have diminishing returns, as riders would be priced off the system.
As EMU, WCC, the arb:University of Michigan, local hospitals, and Ann Arbor's business community pull a large number of employees from Ypsilanti, as well as students at the colleges, those entities have a stake in continued transit service, and are being approached as partners in its preservation. Considering that the colleges are suffering from similar funding crises, of course, their contribution may be limited.
KYR attempted to put an item on the November 2006 ballot that would earmark 0.65 mils of the existing City property tax for transit. This would require the City to dedicate approximately $225,000 out of the existing budget to transit service, guaranteeing that bus service would not be cut, but would require additional budget cuts to be made to other City services. KYR failed to submit the nexessary number of signatures by the deadline, however.
In the longer term, the optimal strategy would be for a regional transit funding mechanism, perhaps County-wide, that would allow for a transit system that would be both more stable and provide better service. This option would, however, require AATA to reorganize, and support for transit funding in out-county areas is uncertain.

All the details are at the group's webpage: Keep Ypsi Rollin

Updates also appear on Ypsidixit's Blog, the birthplace of the movement.

KYR's City Charter ballot proposal has received negative editorials -