FCDC Works to Save 55 Bus

Poster by Gil Loo

by Stephen Brophy

If you have never lived in the West Fenway, you must work to imagine how much like an island it is. Park Drive is the beach that fronts on the Muddy River rather than an ocean, and Boylston St, for a long time has served as a semi-impassable cliff.

Only one bus route – #55 – goes into and out of this neighborhood, and now the MBTA is threatening to discontinue it. Looking at a map the MBTA people think that West Fenwickians have easy access to public transportation in Kenmore Square or at Longwood Ave. They have never tried to actually walk there with an older or disabled person. Even people who want to help save the bus don’t automatically realize just how difficult it can be to get to these other T stops.

This was brought home recently by the faux pas committed by the Fenway Community Development Corporation (FCDC) when calling a meeting to organize community response to the potential demise of the 55 Bus. The meeting was held at CDC headquarters, in the East Fens, an inconvenient location for many of the passengers most affected.

Now the meeting, held on September 8, was not at first intended to be a public meeting, and in the transition from committee meeting to community-wide the locale was never questioned. Sarah Horsley, the FCDC Director of Civic Engagement, says, “some residents expressed concern about the East Fenway location and the late time of the meeting (7:30pm). As someone new to the Fenway, I really welcome such feedback. It also made me aware of just how isolated many seniors and other West Fenway residents feel in terms of transportation, especially at night.

“To remedy the situation that night, we were able to offer rides to several West Fenway residents to the meeting. In the future we will hold meetings about the #55 bus in the West Fenway, and at an earlier time, such as 6pm.” Horsley also made this clear at the beginning of the meeting.

When you gather a group of fired-up people together to figure out how to deal with the problem that brought you together, you need a complex set of skills to allow everyone to speak without the loudest voices dominating. Sarah Horsley has those skills. While running the brainstorming part of the meeting she was able to draw out lots of good suggestions and to quell the efforts to blurt out ideas that interrupted slower speakers. Because of this a good comprehensive list of strategies and tactics was gathered from the meeting.

Generally, participants thought that we should be learning much more about who uses the bus, and when. We should think not only about those living here who need it to get out, but also about those who need it to come here, for appointments at Fenway Health, or going to a ballgame. We should find out more about how much students in the neighborhood use the bus to get to school, and perhaps recruit the schools into a coalition to save the bus. The Red Sox franchise might also want to participate in such a coalition.

We should not think of the 55 Bus as the only problem that the MBTA faces, so that we get into the mindset of saving it regardless of the consequences in some other neighborhood. We might work towards a larger coalition of T riders across all the communities that it covers, to work with the T to find alternative solutions to its financial difficulties. In addition, we will encourage as many people as possible to write to the MBTA to express their support for maintaining full 55 Bus service, and effective and affordable T service overall.

People left the meeting fired up to continue the work, to bring more people to the next meeting, to talk with people on the bus, including the drivers about what the bus means to them. Eventually we will probably be leafleting at bus stops and doing other sorts of outreach, so people were recruited to get that underway. We already have a great poster template designed by West Fenwickian Gil Loo, which you can see at the top of this post.

Watch for more news about this over the next few weeks, because we are not going to let this issue fade away. We are thinking in the short term about saving the bus, but also in the medium and long term about how to improve it. To paraphrase the Obama administration, a crisis should also be seen as an opportunity.