Tag: BRITE Bus service

A solid ‘A’ on Staunton’s report card

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Staunton city council received its biannual report card this past week, giving council members every reason to feel downright chipper. But it’s not all wine and roses, and a couple of red flags popped up.

The report card was Staunton’s second National Community Survey (NCS), which every two years polls city residents on a wide range of topics about city services and quality of life. The survey also compares Staunton’s responses with those of more than 400 other cities that the NCS also surveys, as well as with a smaller subset of that group that more closely matches Staunton demographically. The good news? Staunton’s residents overwhelmingly feel good about their community, and in almost every instance give it higher marks than they did just two years ago. Moreover, Staunton residents rate their city as high or higher than their counterparts in the comparison groups, with only a couple of exceptions.

City residents should look at the survey results to draw their own conclusions, but there are a handful of findings I think are worth singling out. Most encouraging, perhaps, is the great increase in public confidence in city government after several new council members took office in 2024, ending a turbulent few years of contending factions on that governing body. As a result, more city residents think their government is honest, open and transparent, up 15%, and more of them believe their government is acting in their best interests and welcomes resident involvement, up 14%.

Although the great majority of responses were similar to those of two years ago—this year’s survey has a 95% level of confidence, but in its comparisons with 2024, the difference has to exceed 5.97% to be statistically significant—27 items had an upward trend and five ratings decreased. The drops, notably, included a 10% decline in ease of travel by public transportation and a 9% decrease in the overall quality of utility infrastructure. More about both those downturns in a moment.

In addition to overall trends, a key measure in the NCS survey is the gap between the quality of a service or resource and its importance to the respondent. In most cases the weights given to those measures are quite close to each other, but for the two most important categories, there’s a yawning chasm between importance and quality: the city’s economic health was rated at 94% for importance, but got only a 49% rating for quality—and that’s down from 53% two years ago. And the city’s utility infrastructure, rated at 92% for importance, was dinged at merely 57% for quality.

The economic health rating was consistent with the answers to other, similar questions. While Staunton got high marks for the quality of its business and service establishments and the vibrancy of its downtown, those rating its economic development as excellent or good declined to 47% from 51% in 2024—not statistically significant, but suggestive nonetheless. That response also dovetails with a remarkably low 15% replying positively to the question, “What impact, if any, do you think the economy will have on your family income in the next 6 months?” That’s down from 23% two years ago, and while it’s not a Staunton-specific question, it does attest to a broader anxiety that colors local perceptions.

Meanwhile, the gap between the importance of the city’s utility infrastructure and its quality points to two problems with this kind of survey. One is the lack of precision, leaving it up to the respondent to decide what “utility infrastructure” means: does that refer to city-owned and operated utilities, principally water and sewer? Or does it include utilities in the city that are non-municipal monopolies, such as gas and electric, over which the city has little control? The second problem is one of timing, which in this case might have influenced the answers of city residents who lost water shortly before the survey was conducted because of a massive main rupture—or who might have been disgruntled instead by a sudden spate of street closures due to work by Columbia Gas, which also occurred around the time of the survey.

In other words, are Staunton residents waking up to the long overdue need to upgrade a century-old water distribution system, or are they simply unhappy because of ill-timed work by a private utility?

Finally, no summary of high- or low-points would be complete without mention of two of its lowest-rated aspects: the availability of affordable quality housing, which came in at 23%, and the city’s care of its vulnerable residents, down from 44% last year to 38% now. No surprise there, albeit distressingly so. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that both those findings are similar to those of other cities—which only means that we’re no worse than anyplace else, although that’s hardly praiseworthy.

The bottom line, it’s fair to say, is that Staunton’s residents really, really like living here, they feel that the city government is working in everyone’s best interests, but they’re also economically anxious and unsure about the future. Sounds like a solid ‘A,’ but with room for improvement.

P.S. I said I’d get back to the decline in ease of travel by public transportation. That’s another of those questions that is clouded in ambiguity, but I’ll submit again the roundly ignored recommendation I’ve made before: after spending more than a million bucks on upgrading the BRITE Bus hub on Lewis Street, would it be a budget breaker to post maps and schedules on the bus shelters? “Ease of travel” begins with knowing where the buses go, and when.

Paper or cell phone? No contest.

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Maybe this comes as no surprise to anyone but me. Maybe it’s become a commonplace too obvious to prompt comment—but when did it become a given that you are no longer an accepted member of society if you don’t have a cell phone?

One reminder of this was driven home at this past week’s session of Staunton Citizens University, which included a couple of representatives of the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission (CSPDC) extolling the virtues of the BRITE Bus public transportation network . There is, indeed, much to praise about this shuttle system, especially given the largely rural nature of our region, which is not particularly suitable for mass transit. And the CSPDC has done a masterful job of building up the system, most recently spending almost $2 million rebuilding the Hub in downtown Staunton to make it more rider-friendly. Benches, shelters, landscaping, lighting, abundant parking—it’s all there. All except those most basic tools for anyone who wants to take a bus, i.e. a schedule and a route map.

Virtually any mass transit system you can think of posts schedules and large maps behind glass at its sheltered stops. The lack of these essential clues for accessing the bus system is so obvious that the same CSPDC reps, asked about their absence at the Hub this past winter at a Staunton City Council meeting, assured council members they would get right on it. Ten months later, still no maps and still no schedules—but those apparently weren’t in the cards, anyway. Rather, the CSPDC folks said they had intended to post QR codes at the bus shelters, so that passengers could use their cell phones to scan the codes and thus get the information they wanted.

Which assumed, of course, that those passengers had cell phones. And that the cell phones were charged and had QR-code reading capability. And that the QR codes actually got posted, which to date they have not. . . .

More recently, Augusta County alerted the citizenry that it is changing its emergency notification system, going from “Code Red” to “Augusta Alerts” on Nov. 15, and that anyone signed up for Code Red needs to switch to the new system. Augusta Alerts, the county proclaims, “gives users flexibility to choose how they receive alerts—by phone, text, or email,” which may indeed be the case, but first people need to re-register. And the new registration form, in addition to requesting a preferred language and an address, insists that registrants provide a cell phone number. No cell phone, no sign-up. Got a tornado heading your way? Too bad you didn’t have a cell phone to register for that life-saving phone call or email!

This is not the first time I’ve encountered a survey, order form or other screen-based interrogation that won’t permit me to proceed to what I really want without entering a valid cell phone number. There’s no skipping the blank box. No opportunity to write “no cell phone.” And entering my home phone, which is a valid phone number but not a cell phone, just means someone somewhere will be sending me text messages that will never arrive but will leave that person smugly confident that I have received . . . whatever.

It’s not just the expectation that everyone has a cell phone that’s a problem; it’s the assumption that any phone number you provide is for a cell phone. Nobody asks; they just assume. There have been countless times I’ve been assured that someone sent me a text message—not realizing that it’s floating somewhere in cell phone purgatory. But the lack of a response from me seems not to trouble anyone, since apparently it’s inconceivable that I wouldn’t have received a message that was sent, so I’m either ghosting the message sender or just plain rude. Or it doesn’t matter, which is weird no matter how you look at it.

Cell phone networks, unlike the largely abandoned system of wired telephony, are far more precarious than most people realize, making them most vulnerable precisely when they’re most needed. I was working in downtown Washington D.C. when the Pentagon was targeted by al-Quaeda terrorists in 2001, and again a decade later when Virginia was rattled by a 5.7 earthquake. In each case, cell phone networks were overwhelmed almost instantly, transforming those handheld devices into electronic paperweights. Trying to call home, or indeed anywhere, was futile, but that didn’t keep people from trying, growing increasingly frantic with each rebuffed effort.

None of that should signify that I’m opposed to cell phones, just that I recognize their limitations and refuse to build my life around them. I actually have a cell phone but rarely carry it—nor should I have to!— and then chiefly so I can call my wife when I’m away from home. My home phone is more reliable and has better sound clarity, and when I give out that number I’ve now learned to say it’s not a cell so please don’t try texting. My desk top computer, meanwhile, is far more versatile and useful, especially when it comes to looking at a screen dense with information that would overwhelm a hand-held device—like a map. Or a bus schedule.

Neither of those electronic devices can read a QR code, and neither lends itself to being carted around town. And neither is as task-specific as a map or a printed schedule, posted at the site where it’s most needed.