City of Winston-Salem is looking to sell two city buses dressed up as trolley cars. The buses, which haven’t been running since last year, cost $269,000 apiece—paid for with “free” federal transportation funds mind you —-and the city is hoping to get “maybe” $5000 or $10,000 per bus on resale.
Why is W-S selling the trolley buses? You probably know the answer, but I’ll still let Winston-Salem Journal columnist Scott Sexton explain:
In more than 14 years of working downtown, I’ve never once seen more than two riders on it at once. More often than not, it’s empty. Those 6,080 riders must have been lying completely flat on the floor or they were so short that their heads weren’t visible above the windows.
Ah yes—-that explains the empty PART buses I see running up and down the street at all hours of the day. But I digress—-with such low ridership on the trolley buses, Sexton wonders “why on earth would a majority of the City Council – seven of the eight with only Clark against – seem hell bent on pursuing a street car to run through the downtown with a price tag estimated to be $179 million….”
More city government groupthink—-kinda like infill development.
