It’s the month for Halloween, and just in time, Janesville Transit brings Whitewater a trick, but certainly no treat: a Ghost Bus.
One may safely call it this, as it’s almost entirely empty after dropping riders off at multi-billion-dollar Generac, with those few passengers remaining being about as rare and difficult to see as the shades, specters, and apparitions that supposedly haunt graveyards and abandoned houses.
Hundreds of thousands in public money, over a three-year period, and a splashy advertising campaign online and in print, and for it, there’s almost no Whitewater ridership outside of Generac employees.
I’ve embedded the relevant documents from tonight’s Common Council meeting at the bottom of this post.
What do they show (assuming these are even accurately reported passenger trips)?
Generac – flush with a market capitalization of $2.92 billion and a stock price up 72% over the last year – accounts for 30% of all riders, with the Janesville terminal supplying 29%, other Janesville stops 21%, the Milton Piggly Wiggly 10%, Milton other stops 3%, the UW campus only 5%, and non-students, non-Generac workers in Whitewater only 2% of riders.
That’s why the bus seems empty – because when driving through the city, it is empty (or nearly so).
Useless for merchants, useless for ordinary residents, who are stuck subsidizing a big corporation and a bigger city’s transit system.
In my office, I have page upon page of all the color print advertisements Janesville Transit has purchased – full page, many of them – to hawk this bus. They’ve also bought web ads at a local newspaper, thereby creating a conflict with that paper’s reporting on this pricey effort.
For all that money spent, and all the grand crowing about how many passenger trips there would be for our city, what happened?
Janesville’s transit director first said that 2012 was his test year, then it was 2013 that would be the test year, and here we are, near the end of ’13: all that advertising, all those grand claims, most of it at public expense, with the largest portion for a billion-dollar corporation shipping non-resident employees to Whitewater, and here are the embarrassing results.
This is a money-suck, crony capitalist failure. These thousands, for example, could better provide genuine support to small, local merchants, in the downtown or elsewhere.
Generac can and should pay its own way.
What’s really scary about Janesville Transit’s Innovation Express Ghost Bus?
That anyone in Whitewater might pour still more public money into this scheme.
you said it! keep up the good work, john
It’s a joke that sends money to Janesville/Milton.
They should hire people here.
I saw the ads you are talking about.Real big ones.These guys did everything they could to sell this idea in color ads.No one in town is taking despite the ads.
It really is empty when it goes in town.
They think people owe them like it is a favor to waste gas and take money when they have so muchtheir own already.
How do we stop this corruption..?
Advocates of this program will say anything to keep it going, even if those claims are false or contradictory – they see it as an institutional obligation, something owed between one municipal administration and another.
The way to address it, I think, is with a new form of commentary – they’ll insert it into the 2014 budget during early November otherwise.
Ghost Riders in the Pie… 😉
I spoke to a UWW student who initially started riding the bus, but quickly abandoned it because it would stop and sit at Generac for 15 minutes before heading to campus. His comment was “The bus exists strictly to serve Generac.”
These comments are much appreciated. The student’s observation is spot on – thanks for sharing.