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.
