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How Can Vermonters Drive Less?

A bus in a station with a person crossing a crosswalk in front of it.
Elodie Reed
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VPR
What's going to get Vermonters on the bus?

For a state that calls itself green, Vermont sure has a lot of drivers. So what can be done?

Note: Our show is made for the ear! As always, we recommend listening if you can. 

Brave Little State answers questions about Vermont that have been submitted and voted on by you, our audience. Because we think our journalism is better when you’re a part of it.

In this episode, a question about public transportation forces us to confront an ugly truth.

“We pride ourselves on our environmental ethic and our state land use laws and our building efficiency standards,” says Julie Campoli, who manages and edits Sustainable Transportation Vermont. “But when it comes to transportation, it’s a really big blind spot that Vermonters have.”

How big of a blind spot? More than 43% of Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation, more than any other economic sector. It’s a number that’s rising, while Vermonters’ use of public transit is barely budging.

Cars drive on a highway.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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VPR
Vermonters drive. A lot.

Subscribe to Brave Little State for free, so you never miss an episode:

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Curt McCormack used to love cars. Especially the Triumph TR3 he owned when he was a teenager.

“You probably don’t know what that is,” he says. “It’s a British sports car, very small, really fun.”

And he’s always admired the engineering that makes the automobile run:

“I was a backyard car mechanic. I loved cars. The internal combustion engine is an amazing thing.”

As McCormack got older, though, he began to realize that these amazing things were doing some serious damage.

“Yeah, the 40,000 some-odd people that are killed every year. Climate change. The air pollution,” he says. “The several hundred thousand people that still die from air pollution every year in the U.S.”

A person next to a painting of a car with blood on the bumper.
Credit Peter Hirschfeld / VPR
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VPR
Curt McCormack, who is voluntarily carless, has a striking painting in his home. He says the blood on the fender represents the ramifications of mass automobile use in the United States, such as climate change, air pollution and traffic fatalities.

So sometimes when you love something, you have to let it go. McCormack doesn’t drive anymore, or even own a car. He hasn’t since 2002, when his Nissan Sentra took its last breath.

“I called up a junkyard, and they came and got it, and I thought, ‘I’m going to try to do without a car,’” he says. “And it was surprisingly easy.”

The 67-year-old Burlington resident is tall and thin, maybe from all the walking and biking he does. And he says he can get to work in Montpelier, and just about anywhere else he needs to, without a car. But he also lives right in downtown Burlington. And he can literally see the nearest bus stop from his living room window.

The reason McCormack decided to give up his car was to force himself to use public transportation. To make his lifestyle align with his values.

There are probably lots of people in Vermont who would like to do less driving. But what about the ones who can’t see the bus stop from their house?

“I have the sense that people who live in Burlington maybe do have an effective system,” says Eve Jacobs-Carnahan. “But I live in central Vermont.”

A person in a hat and glasses.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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This month's winning question-asker, Eve Jacobs-Carnahan of Montpelier, shares a car with her husband.

Eve lives in Montpelier. For the past four years, she and her husband, Paul Carnahan, have been sharing a car — a Tesla Model 3.

Eve works at home. Paul works in Barre, so he usually gets the car. But say Eve has an afternoon meeting in Waterbury.

“There’s no bus to Waterbury in the afternoon,” she says. “I’m going to have to have the car that day.”

So Paul will catch the morning bus to Barre.

“It works pretty well when the weather is good,” Eve says. “It tends to not be able to keep its schedule when the weather is bad, and that’s when it’s most uncomfortable.”

When they can’t make the bus work, either Paul or Eve will call a colleague or friend and ask for a ride.

“And my friends have now figured out that they’re gonna hear from me for some of these regular monthly meetings,” Eve says. “They now will approach me and say, ‘Hey, our monthly meeting of such and such is coming up, do you want a ride?’”

Eve and Paul could afford two cars – they share just one by choice, to shrink their carbon footprint. But it’s not easy.

“To get to Waterbury, to get to Burlington on the weekend, there is no good system,” Eve says. “And every time I run into some sort of frustration with not being able to get somewhere because I’m not the one with the car that day, I just say, ‘Why don’t we have a better transit system here?’”

Eve Jacobs-Carnahan, if you haven’t figured it out, is today’s question-asker. She asked:

“What will it take to create an effective public transit system that enables Vermonters to dramatically reduce automobile use?”

A.K.A.: How can we drive less?

“The other reason that I really wonder about this is because Vermonters pride themselves on being so environmentally conscious,” Eve says. “But this just seems to be a real conundrum.”

It’s a conundrum, all right. Remember Curt McCormack, the voluntarily car-less guy we met at the very beginning? Not to bury the lede, but he’s actually a state representative. When he commutes to Montpelier by bus, it’s to the Vermont Statehouse. And McCormack is also the chair of the House Transportation Committee. If anyone would have the answer to Eve’s question, it’s him.

So we asked him: What would it take to create a public transportation system that allows Vermonters to dramatically reduce their reliance on cars?

“Well, I have the same question,” McCormack says. “And I’ve been clearly tasked with trying to solve that by the speaker, when I was made chairman.”

So, does that mean he has the answer? 

“It does not.”

A thin grey line.

Where we're starting

All told, Vermont spends about $40 million a year on public transportation. And it turns out that’s pretty high — compared to other rural states, at least.

“There are places that you can live in Vermont without having your own car,” says Ross MacDonald, public transit coordinator and Go Vermont program manager at the Vermont Department of Transportation. “Burlington comes to mind. Some of our downtown centers have circulator services. There are indeed people without cars in the state who get by just fine.”

MacDonald says one of the reasons he loves his job is that Vermont takes public transit really seriously.

Vermont is one of 11 states with more than 40 percent of its population living in rural areas. And we spend 10 times more on public transit per capita than all but one of one of those states.

A bus stop sign seen through a bus door window.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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Vermont spends more on public transportation than most rural states.

Ross MacDonald says that money funds a pretty robust network that provided almost 5 million so-called “user trips” in 2018.

“Traditional fixed-route services are generally in operation along those corridors that justify the investment,” he says.

A “fixed-route” service is when a public transit vehicle — usually a bus, here in Vermont —travels a designated route on a fixed schedule. The Montpelier LINK Express, for instance, takes the same route from Montpelier to Burlington at the same time every weekday.

According to MacDonald, the places that “justify the investment” in these kinds of services are places that have a lot of people, or that are along busy highway corridors.

MacDonald says that means if you live in a super rural area, you probably won’t find a fixed-route bus anywhere nearby. And you’re probably going to have a rough time getting around without a car.

And MacDonald says for him, Eve’s inquiry begets another interesting question:

“When I saw the Brave Little State question, I was wondering, would we be interested even, as a population, to consider the nuances, the tax incentives and dis-incentives, the land-use patterns, to generate the revenues to provide public transit service – to get everybody to where they want to get to when they want to get there?” 

It’s a good question. So, what do Vermonters want from their public transportation system?

We took this opportunity to ask you, our brilliant audience, how you would improve public transit here. As always, you delivered. Take a listen:

brave-little-state-043-transportation-dreams-20191206.mp3
We asked: What's your dream public transit improvement for Vermont? Here's what you told us.

Meet Marcia

It’s one thing to fantasize about public transit utopias of the future. But for some people in Vermont, the question of how to get around is more urgent.

Marcia Kepnes is 71 years old, and she lives in an old pink house about a mile outside Barre City. 

She also doesn’t own a car. Not because she wouldn’t love to drive — but because she can’t.

“I have never, never driven, ‘cause I have always been legally blind,” she says.

That part about never driving isn’t entirely true. When Kepnes was a teenager, her dad let her get behind the wheel during a visit to Cape Cod.

“I pressed too hard on the gas because I wasn’t used to the pedals, and we went up a sand dune,” she recalls. “And that was the last time my father took me driving.”

Kepnes moved to Vermont from the Boston area when she was in her late twenties.

“Now, I knew when I came up here that it was unfair to expect anything like the MTA in Boston,” she says.

And for a while at least, Kepnes says the public transportation system in Barre was more than serviceable. She could get to her kids’ schools and run errands.

A woman stands on the front porch of a pink house.
Credit Peter Hirschfeld / VPR
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Marcia Kepnes, seen here outside her home in Barre, isn't able to drive, and relies exclusively on public transportation to get around.

But then her knees gave out. And she couldn’t navigate the mile-long walk down the hill to the nearest bus stop.

“As situations increased my need, the transportation system became less and less adequate,” Kepnes says.

Instead of the “fixed-route” public transportation we talked about earlier, Marcia Kepnes relies on a different kind of public service, called “demand response.” It’s when customers request rides in advance, and then a bus or van or car takes them directly to their destination.

So when Kepnes needs to go somewhere, she relies on volunteer drivers from the Vermont Association for the Blind, and demand-response buses run by Green Mountain Transit.

It all sounds well and good. But in order to assure a ride, Kepnes says she often has to book a week in advance.

“This is the trouble with the system,” she says. “You have to plan. I have no spontaneity or urgency and that’s the great anxiety.”

A bus window with a sign asking riders to give up seats for people with disabilities.
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Vermont's current public transit system doesn't allow for much spontaneity for riders who are less mobile.

When Brave Little State visited Kepnes, Barre had just gotten its first winter storm of the year. And Kepnes says the day before it came, she realized she didn’t have any salt to melt the ice that would soon be covering her sidewalk.

“And I just was beside myself with anxiety,” she says. “There were certain things that I had to get. And this is very rare, because I try to live so I don’t run out. But occasionally you have to get stuff.”

Kepnes says she lays awake at night, gaming out strategies to get to the places she needs to go.

“How am I going to manage and rearrange my life? And who can I ask and who can I count on if I’ve got an urgent need?” she says. “And boy, that is a tough thing. That is very hard. It’s very, very stressful.

“This is half my life, is planning my transportation.”

Convenience vs. morality

So, we’ve got people like Marcia Kepnes, who need public transportation. And then we’ve got people like our question-asker Eve, who want to use more of it.

But as we’ve heard, the current system isn’t really working for either of them. Which brings us back to the question we started with: What would it take to create a public transportation system that actually allows people to drive less, or not at all?

We figured the answer to Eve’s question would be all about infrastructure — big engineering projects, new fleets of shiny buses.

A moving image of a bus window driving into sunlight.
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Is the answer to Vermont's driving problem a new fleet of shiny buses or ... actually using the ones we already have?

But it turns out there’s another huge variable here: human behavior. And, dare we say it, hypocrisy.

“The environmental community in Vermont is sizeable. I think it’s large enough [that] if half of them used transit instead of their cars at least a lot of the times, if not most of time, that would make more than a dent,” says Curt McCormack, the state rep who chairs of the House Transportation Committee.

McCormack says if Vermonters really want better public transit, then we’ve all got to walk the walk. Or rather, ride the bus.

“I mean, when you see a bus with 30 seats on it and there’s only four people in the bus, obviously there’s the potential for 30 to have seats,” he says.

McCormack is raising a nagging question here about ridership on Vermont’s public transit. It increased steadily in Vermont from 2012 to 2015. But it dropped off in 2016. And according to a new state report, the numbers still haven’t recovered. 

Until they do, McCormack says it’ll be almost impossible to convince lawmakers to spend more money on upgrades.

“It’s very difficult, politically, to put more money into transit if it doesn’t look very likely that people will ride that transit,” he says.

It’s an “If you build it, will they come?” question, says Rachelle Gould, an assistant professor at the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont.

“Absolutely, people need to want to engage in low-carbon forms of transportation,” Gould says. “They have to want to try something other than their car.”

Gould studies environmental values and behavior. And she says even with growing awareness of climate change, old driving habits die hard.

Light falls on a woman and her child in a bus.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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Part of reducing Vermont's CO2 emissions due to transportation is on us, the drivers and would-be bus riders.

“This becomes very complicated, think about, how am I going to manage getting myself from A to B to C, and with kids, and with pets,” Gould says, characterizing the driver’s dilemma. “How is this all going to work?”

If you own a car, you can probably relate to this. It’s the same deal for our question-asker Eve and her husband Paul.

“My husband might wait an extra 20 minutes or half an hour because the bus is really late, and so that’s really frustrating,” Eve says. “That’s one of the reasons he usually gets to have the car.”

So part of this is on us, and our willingness to really change our daily routine for the greater good. Rachelle Gould says a lot of our choices come down to this dichotomy: convenience versus morality.

“I think the way to approach this issue of transportation is to work on both sides of that issue,” Gould says “So, make it more and more convenient, make it more and more feasible to do this in a practical way, to get around without a car. And also, work on awareness of this issue, and how does it play into our larger moral concerns as a society, as a globe?”

Transportation planners unite

It’s a Friday afternoon, and there are a dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Agency of Transportation in Barre. 

Public transit managers, state transportation employees, and advocates for people with disabilities are here to review a legislative study aiming to increase transit ridership in Vermont.

Their primary goal is not to drastically overhaul Vermont’s public transit system. Instead, they want to help entice more Vermonters to use the system we already have.

“The Legislature was looking for guidance from the study, if we have recommendations of ways to increase ridership and improve the public transit system, what are the highest priorities to do that, and how much is it going to cost,” says Stephen Falbel, a longtime transportation consultant based in Montpelier whom the state hired to oversee the study.

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And, sure, Falbel is all for adding a bus route here and there. Or running buses more frequently. Or even launching a marketing campaign. But:

“At best, you’d get incremental increases in ridership as a result of those investments. Not nothing, but not a huge shift.”

So how do you get a huge shift? If Rachelle Gould thinks we need to make public transit way more convenient in order to change people’s habits, Stephen Falbel thinks we need to make driving way less convenient. That’s the only way to get to the dramatic change Eve is asking about.

“Behavior change only happens in a crisis atmosphere or if the incentives change drastically from what they were,” Falbel says. “And one major theme is changing competitive balance between driving and transit.”

One way to do that is by rethinking parking. It sounds simple, but Stephen Falbel says this is the magic bullet answer to Eve’s question.

“The number one issue — or really the number one, two and three issue — is parking,” Falbel says. “The availability of parking, the location of parking and the pricing of parking. If you have a lot of free parking, transit is going to be a hard sell no matter what.”

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Falbel says if you look around the country at places where people use public transit the most — “Manhattan, downtown Boston, the Longwood Medical area, San Francisco” — you’ll see that those places also have the highest cost of parking. And Falbel says that is not a coincidence.

“High parking charges will get people to take the bus instead,” he says.

More expensive parking will help — and so will more expensive gas. But, these are not popular opinions, especially among elected officials. 

So for now at least, the political climate in Vermont doesn’t look too conducive to those sorts of seismic policy shifts. 

But one guy isn’t waiting for Montpelier to lead.

All aboard the Budd cars

Our question-asker Eve joins Brave Little State for an interview with David Blittersdorf at an industrial park in Barre. (Another perk of submitting a winning question: You can join us for our reporting trips!)

A person stands in the center of one person with a microphone and another talking into it.
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Eve Jacob-Carnahan tags along with VPR reporter Peter Hirschfeld to interview renewable energy developer David Blittersdorf.

Blittersdorf has a high profile in the renewable energy world. Thanks to his work on mountaintop wind turbines in Vermont, people either admire him or despise him. But his latest venture has nothing to do with wind.

“I said, ‘What are we going to do about this carbon crisis?’ Well, we’re going to have to do something about transportation,” he says. “In Vermont, it’s almost half of our CO2 emissions and half of our fossil fuel use.”

Blittersdorf thinks one way to answer Eve’s question is to invest in trains. And guess what? He happens to own 12 of them.

Blittersdorf leads us inside one of his so-called Budd cars, which are named for the manufacturer that originally built them.

“Eighty-eight people can sit,” he says. “We have places for wheelchairs in the front and back — those seats can fold down. You can put about 136 people with standing, so you can put a lot of folks in these things.”

Blitterdorf bought these self-propelled, diesel-powered rail cars at auction a few years ago. And he envisions a passenger rail network that connects all the major population hubs in Vermont. 

He says Vermonters could leave their cars at home for the most part, or get rid of them altogether, and take the train to commute to work and run errands.

Blittersdorf says he wants to launch the first route of his passenger rail network on a century-old rail line between Barre and Montpelier. But the tracks need some work. And according to a new study commissioned by the Agency of Transportation, it’ll cost anywhere between $64 million and $96 million to prepare the eight-mile route for passenger rail capability.

Blittersdorf disputes those cost projections. He says Vermont could ready the tracks for his Budd cars for as little as $3 million. And he says he’ll urge lawmakers to fund the upgrade in next year’s transportation budget.

A person standing between train seats.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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David Blittersdorf has a vision of local commuter rail between Vermont's major population hubs.

Eve is intrigued. And since she lives less than a mile from the train tracks that run through Montpelier, she can imagine herself catching one of these trains. 

But she wonders about people who live farther out.      

“I’m thinking of people I know who live in East Montpelier, Middlesex, Calais, if they have to get in their car to drive to Montpelier to get on the train, they’re not going to park and go on the train,” she tells Blittersdorf. “So that was a puzzle that I was wondering about.”

His response: “Well, the part of the puzzle on all of the transit is, I think in the United States we have failed in the integration of all the transit.”

Blittersdorf says Vermont needs a coordinated rail and bus system. Where you can take a convenient combination of bus and train to get where you need to go. In the transit world, this is called multi-modal transportation.

“You integrate the walking, the biking, the short-haul busing, and you integrate a system that works,” Blittersdorf says. “And you run it like the Swiss: On time, reliable.”

But to Eve’s point, about people who live in more rural areas?

“We are probably not going to be able to take care of a lot of these people,” Blittersdorf concedes. “And it goes back to our central problem, and that is what the car did by moving us into the sticks and allowing us to have a single person drive a car.”

The land-use conundrum

“There’s a real cost to living far away from everywhere you need to go every day,” says Julie Campoli, an  urban design consultant and the editor of Sustainable Transportation Vermont.

“We can’t just spread out, you know, live everywhere, off by ourselves on 10-acre lots, and still have a way of getting around that is environmentally benign,” Campoli says. “And so, I’m asking people to kind of own that.”

And Campoli is allowed to say that, because she lives in the heart of Burlington’s South End, on a tree-lined street with lots of neighbors.

“Well, yeah, on the other hand I’m lucky to live here,” she points out. “And I think if I was moving here now at the age when I moved here, I wouldn’t be able to afford it. So that’s really important, that we create affordable housing for people of all different ages and income levels in our urban centers.”

[Related episode: Why Does Vermont Have Such A Housing Crunch?]

Here in Burlington, Campoli commutes by bike and bus and car. And she says where we live has everything to do with how we travel — and vice versa.

“It’s really about how we move around, and unless we can change that in the U.S., we’re never going to have the kind of wonderful places — healthy places — that we want to have,” she says.

For Campoli, the gold standard is walkability. She’s actually written a book about this, called Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form. She says whether you’re going to catch a bus or a train or just trying to shed your car to run some errands, you’re spending time walking. And most people will only willingly do that if it’s a pleasant experience.

“And if that walk at either end of that journey is not safe and comfortable and relatively short, then people are not going to choose transit as the option if they can avoid it,” she says.

So this is another part of the answer to Eve’s question: What would it take to grow public transit in Vermont? Design places that are conducive to taking it.

“That requires a lot of planning and a lot of good urban design, but we have a great template for how to do it,” Campoli says, “and that’s all of our historic downtowns and villages.”

(On mobile? Click here to see the video, which Campoli retrieved from the Vermont Historical Society archives and featured on her blog, of crowds of people walking through downtown Rutland in 1941).

Back in the day, Campoli says, many of Vermont’s mid-size cities and towns were connected by railroads and trolleys and buses. But we won’t be able to bring those services back until we revitalize those communities.

“If you think in terms of urban centers like St. Johnsbury, and Hardwick, and Springfield, and Windsor, and Bennington, you know, those are the centers for those rural areas,” Campoli says. “So if we focus on rebuilding population and economic activity into those places, they will become much more transit-friendly.”

Public transportation 2.0

Until we can do that — if we can do that — there may be a way to create a different, 21st century transit system. One that rivals the car and allows us to live where we live right now.

When we put a call out for Vermonters’ dream public transit improvements, we got an interesting submission from John Snell.

“We could select cars that are safe and well maintained, and drivers that are safe and well maintained, and allow them to become basically public Uber drivers,” John suggested. “And any transactions about where I want to go and what I would pay for it, could all be handled by phone.”

It might sound fanciful, but this general concept is actually catching on in the public transit world. It’s called microtransit.

“Microtransit really is sort of the next evolution of public transportation,” says Zack Wasserman, the chief strategy officer at a New York-based company called Via. “It’s sort of public transit 2.0 or 3.0.”

The company, he says, licenses microtransit techonology and sells contracted microtransit services to cities, transit agencies and departments of transportation “all over the place.”

What does this mean? Maybe you’ve taken a Lyft or an Uber before. This is called on-demand transportation. Microtransit takes it a step further: on-demand meets carpooling meets public transit.

“So, with a microtransit service, you take out your smartphone, the smartphone immediately triangulates your location, you say where you want to go, and then a vehicle is dispatched to pick you up,” Wasserman explains. “You get in the vehicle and it takes you to where you’re going, and along the way it makes short stops to pick up and drop off other people. But it does that in a really efficient and seamless way.”

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Via licenses the technology and sometimes the drivers and vehicles to make this happen. The idea is to help communities modernize their public transit options, increase ridership, and of course, Wasserman says, “to give people a viable alternative to using their own vehicle.”

Wasserman says Via builds accessibility into its services, so you can use it even if you don’t have a smartphone or a credit card, or if you have a physical disability. And he says interest in microtransit is growing.

“We are in 22 countries and in [21] states,” he says. “The adoption has been extremely brisk, you could even say exponential.”

And soon enough, Via may be in our very own capital city. Several groups in Montpelier are hoping to launch an on-demand microtransit pilot project. They want to use Via’s system and a few vans to replace three fixed bus routes.

“For decades, we’ve been separating personal vehicles from public transit, and they’re seen as two completely separate ways of getting around. What I would hope the direction that Vermont and Montpelier can go is actually blending those together,” says Laura Biren, a research assistant at the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition, one of the groups working toward the pilot.

More from VPR: ‘Coffee-Pooling’: A New Way To Travel From Worcester To Montpelier (And Back) [Aug. 8]

“Microtransit can increase accessibility to transportation, including linking up with the buses that go to places like Burlington and St. Johnsbury,” Biren says. “So it’s all connected.”

“We see that this a no-brainer as far as people wanting to use this as a way of getting around town rather than their personal cars,” says Dan Jones, executive director of the coalition.

Jones says the same-old public transit simply won’t get enough people out of their own vehicles. And he says until that happens, downtown Montpelier is going to continue to be majority parking.

“Like 60 percent of our downtown is dedicated to parking lots,” Jones says. “This means that we don’t have the ability to do any kind of development in town of housing, commercial space. We’re basically victims of the car.”

The Sustainable Montpelier Coalition thinks microtransit in Montpelier could be a model for other Vermont communities. But Zack Wasserman, of Via, says there's one caveat: In rural areas like ours, it’s not always feasible to offer instant, on-demand rides. So people might have to call ahead.

Kind of like what Marcia Kepnes already does.

'You have to have empathy'

Kepnes is the woman in Barre we met earlier — who’s legally blind, who can’t drive, and who has to plan her whole life around public transportation.

Since Kepnes spends so much thinking about public transit, we ask her if she’d try to answer Eve’s question. What if she were the secretary of the Agency of Transportation, and money were no object? How would she solve Vermont’s public transit problems?

Kepnes says the question reminds her of a survey she got from Green Mountain Transit, where they asked people to say how many pennies from each dollar should go to various components of the transit system. And she doesn’t like this kind of question.

“This is not fair to ask me to decide how to spend money,” Kepnes says.

It’s not fair, she says, because this isn’t about money. 

A moving image of a bus window passing houses.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
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Public transit becomes a whole different thing when you need it, and know how it feels to need it.

“What you’ve got to do in this system, prior to leaving it to me to tell you how to spend money, is to change your attitudes,” Kepnes says. “You have to change the attitude towards the needs of people. You have to have empathy.”  

Kepnes says she wishes everybody working on public transit in Vermont had to live without their cars for a month. So they’d understand what it’s like when you need to get somewhere, but you can’t.

“It’s not money. It’s empathy,” Kepnes says. “You have to feel the need. And I don’t know how to do that, except to talk as I talk.”

To talk as she talks, and to hope someone's listening.

A thin grey line.

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Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public Radio. We have support from the VPR Innovation Fund. How can you support us? Make a gift to the station, or recommend our show to your friends and loved ones.Our editor is Lynne McCrea and our digital producer is Elodie Reed. Engineering support from Peter Engisch and Chris Albertine. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions:

  • "FasterFasterBrighter"
  • "Tall Talisman"
  • "Scallat"
  • "Secret Pocketbook"
  • "Louver"
The Vermont Statehouse is often called the people’s house. I am your eyes and ears there. I keep a close eye on how legislation could affect your life; I also regularly speak to the people who write that legislation.
Angela Evancie serves as Vermont Public's Senior VP of Content, and was the Director of Engagement Journalism and the Executive Producer of Brave Little State, the station's people-powered journalism project.
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