Bee columnist’s first Fresno bus ride started with a gross cleanup. It got better | Opinion

During all this time of living in Fresno and Clovis, now going on 26 years, I’ve never once taken the bus.

The thought occurred to me during Fresno’s June budget hearings while watching assistant city manager/director of transportation Greg Barfield make his presentation before the city council.

Such a blind spot in my local knowledge didn’t sit well. Of course you hear stories, which tend to tilt negative, but what was the experience of utilizing public transportation in Fresno really like? What’s more, what was it like on a hot summer day?

Determined to find out, I studied the Fresno FAX route maps and formulated a day-long odyssey that would take me throughout the city utilizing nine of the service’s 18 routes.

To mimic the experience as best as possible, my itinerary included one half-mile walk between routes and a transfer that required a 30-minute wait at a nondescript intersection. And to ensure the presence of at least two interesting riding companions, Fresno City Council President Tyler Maxwell and Barfield were invited to join me for separate legs.

Opinion

For various reasons, I started out by taking Fresno’s flagship Route 1 Q-Bus Rapid Transit during the morning commute for its 4-mile length along Blackstone and Ventura/Kings Canyon/Cesar Chavez (whatever we’re calling it these days). To get there from Clovis, I left the house at 7 a.m., pedaled my bike 5 miles across northeast Fresno and locked it up outside a bank at the corner of Friant Road and Fresno Street.

Two buses were parked at the Woodward station a few minutes before 7:45. As I chatted with one of the drivers, he turned his head slightly and remarked “There’s my director!” with some degree of surprise as Barfield walked over to join us. The driver then proceeded to explain that the other bus was out of service because someone defecated inside (he used more colorful vernacular) and the sanitation crew had been summoned.

“Oh crap,” I thought to myself. “Is this how the day is going to go?”

The answer turned out to be a resounding “no.” After spending a day immersed in Fresno’s public transportation system, I can honestly say that was the only disturbing thing I either saw, smelled or heard.

Here are some other general takeaways: The actual riding experience is pretty pleasant. The buses arrived when the route schedule indicated they would (one was 4-5 minutes tardy) and were well air-conditioned. Crucial for mid-August.

The drivers I rode with were professional and safe. FAX buses might be the only vehicles on our roads that always use turn signals and don’t gun it at yellow lights. And the current $1 fare — students, seniors and disabled persons ride for free — is extraordinarily cheap.

Waiting for the bus, on the other hand, wasn’t pleasant in any sense. Even at stations equipped with shelters, the tiny patch of discolored asphalt masquerading as shade on a 106-degree day hardly does any good.

During a half-hour wait at Ashlan and Hughes in central Fresno, where the bus stop consists of a signed pole, the only thing that prevented me and three others (two young women and a toddler) from melting into the sidewalk was the presence of a healthy, mature ash tree.

‘Typical’ rider is female, with kids

Barfield, a City Hall veteran who oversees the Department of Transportation, tells me it’s common for someone to have lived here for 25 years and never used public transit. The subset includes his two grown children, both in their late 20s.

My “excuse” is that I’ve never needed the bus. Always had a functioning automobile and zero problem with biking a few miles or, when absolutely necessary, summoning rideshare.

What I’ve come to better appreciate is how the local populace can be cleaved into two groups: those who don’t need and don’t use the bus for whatever reason, and those who can’t do without it.

“Our typical rider is a female,” Barfield says. “She’s riding the bus to go to school, work and her medical appointments. She typically has two or three children with her and she’s making less than $13,000 per year. So she is dependent on transit. This is the only vehicle to get where she needs to go.”

When the Route 1 sets off from Woodward station, Barfield and I are the only people aboard. But as the bus returns to Blackstone and starts heading south, more and more people get on at each stop. By the time we get south of Shaw Avenue it’s standing room only until Fresno City College, where about half the passengers disembark.

I witnessed similar ridership patterns on other routes. At times the buses were fairly or nearly full. At others, practically or completely empty.

The Fresno FAX system provided more than 8 million rides during the 2023 fiscal year. While that number has been growing, Barfield doesn’t expect ridership to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2025 at the earliest.

To help bolster ridership, the city recently began offering free wifi on all buses. (It works better on some than others.) Earlier this week, four routes saw their frequencies increased, including one that was extended to serve Central Unified’s Justin Garza High west of 99.

Council’s public transit advocate

In recent years, there has been no larger advocate for Fresno FAX and public transit in general than Maxwell. The 31-year-old council member remembers having to ride the bus around town as a kid (“It was kind of a treat”) after his dad no longer had a car.

“We’ve got to make sure our public transportation system is one that’s worthy of the 21st century,” Maxwell says as the bus we’re riding cruises along Dakota Avenue. “It should be reliable, it should be accessible, it should be affordable and it should be clean and safe.

“We’re trying to make our buses all of those things so we can attract not just the people who need the bus but people who have a car and want to ride it because it’s quicker to get to your destination.”

Maxwell went on to extol the environmental benefits of reducing the number of cars on our roads, which is something that should never be left out of the conversation when discussing one of the nation’s worst air basins.

Perhaps my favorite part about riding the bus, even as a journalistic exercise, was getting the chance to talk with people I normally wouldn’t:

The young mother, sitting next to her toddler son, traveling to “pick up” another son from school. The wheelchair-bound woman heading to physical therapy. Dudes toting longboards under their arms. The tousled-haired teen commuting to his job at Popeye’s at Shaw and Cedar with a bike secured to the front carrier because he gets off work at midnight and the last bus comes by at 11:34.

As for me, I made it back to the Woodward station a little after 5 — roughly 9 hours after setting off. Then during the ride home, my rear tire flattened and I ended up having to walk the final 2 miles under the broiling sun.

Never more in my life have I longed for the comfort of an air conditioned bus.