Anyone who rides one of HART's most popular bus routes could save some cash under a new plan approved by the Tampa City Council.
The narrowly approved plan would make Route 1 free for a year.
The route has 56 stops, from north near USF and going south, mostly down Florida Avenue, all the way to the Marion Transit Center in downtown Tampa.
The route sees roughly 3,000 passengers per day.
And Justin Willits, HART's director of planning and scheduling, said it would help out a lot of people close to the route.
“18% of the households along the corridor within a quarter mile do not own a vehicle,” Willits said. “26% of people are under the poverty line. 64% are minority, and 14% have a disability."
The idea faced a decent amount of pushback from council members.
Tampa City Councilwoman Gwen Henderson says she doesn't like the idea of the city spending $1.5 million on a service that wouldn’t benefit many other bus riders in need.
“There are other routes that are not free in our city, and it's really about equity,” Henderson said. “And for us to provide additional funding wouldn't be fair to other areas in Tampa that could use financial support.”
Councilman Bill Carlson said HART should look at other avenues for increasing their own funding, like putting a millage rate increase to the voters, instead of pulling money out of the budget for the city of Tampa.
“[HART’s] a separate government agency,” Carlson said. “It should be solving its own issues.”
Carlson also said members of the community would get just a taste of the service before the city couldn’t pay for it anymore within a year.
"We'll give people a year to ride this, and then the money's gonna go away,” Carlson said. “HART can't fund it. Everybody's saying the county is not going to fund it. The state's not going to fund it. So who's going to fund it? Nobody's going to fund it."
Willits, along with other council members, pushed back.
“Until the city steps up to fund better bus service, we are going to perpetually be in the same condition we’ve been in since 1979,” Willits said.
Other council members were on board with the plan.
"How do we decrease cars on the road? This is a way to try,” Lynn Hurtak said. “And I'm really sorry to hear that people aren't willing to at least give it a try."
Hurtak said the plan is very low-cost when compared with the $95 million Bus Rapid Transit project, which would follow roughly the same route.
“What this will do for a fraction, for maybe 1% of that money, is give the ability to go faster and get more people on transit,” Hurtak said.
Luis Viera is a Tampa councilman, as well as the board chair for HART.
“All that I want to do is to help out the hard-working men and women, and the families who take the HART bus every single day,” Viera said.
Viera also said if funding is temporarily provided for the TECO Line Streetcar System to keep it free, he finds it hard to scrutinize a temporary pot of money for a often-used HART bus route.
The plan passed by a slim margin, 4-3.
For the plan to take effect, the HART board needs to approve it at a meeting later this month.
“I would be very surprised if the HART board did not support this,” Viera said.
