They simply did not want to buy into any part of the Blueprint purporting to change 'business as usual' yet promoting a bypass. Nearly a decade later, not much has changed. Roads continue to be the concert master of the Grand Rapids transportation system while transit plays a distant second fiddle. Jim Buck, the chairman of Metro Council, says the organization is unsure about how aggressively it can promote public transportation because some of its members are ambivalent, particularly several suburbs unwilling to support a property tax increase to pay for increased service. Mr. Buck, who also is the mayor of Grandville, said it would be more comfortable to push for transit if the business community were involved.
Transportation is a weak link.
There are enough committees out there studying this thing. I think it's going to take a major push among employers to get it straightened out. His fleet of 75 buses last year carried more than 3.6 million passengers and logged about 2.3 million miles. Even so, because of the restricted service there are relatively few riders, who alone don't make a sizable enough constituency to compel local government officials to give the system more support. Since the 1940s the federal government has conducted numerous traffic studies on the causes of congestion, each concluding that new roads do not relieve it.