Essentially, they're taking taxpayer money that's supposed to be used for public transportation for the city and cutting a bunch of city routes in order to expand the UNT bus system. The problem is, the UNT buses are paid through the student's fees. They should not be paid for taxpayer money and, due to these cuts, hundreds of people that rely on the city bus to get to work will now no longer have city bus stops in our area. And their justification is: Well, we expanded UNT's buses. That are, of course, meant for students only.

Of course one of the reasons I picked this up is I myself live in Denton. Now, I may not use the public transit system myself but I can foresee huge issues with the proposed cuts. I know that this system is used by a rather large group of people. Although a lot of the users are college students (we are a college city with two major universities and a community college. The University of North Texas, Texas Woman's University, and North Central Texas College) I often see a lot of older and even elderly riders. As another citizen puts it:

"Try to remember that 'just a couple of blocks' to a young, healthy person is not a big deal. It's a long way [for others] if its 100 degrees or if you are carrying bags of groceries."

We have a large number of apartment communities in Denton, if anything we should be expanding routes, not cutting back. The next public meeting will be at 1 p.m. Tuesday at South Branch Library, 3228 Teasley Lane Denton, Texas.

Update from Dee Leggett, Vice President Communications and Planning:

Please allow me to clarify the misrepresentations in your blog. We (DCTA) are not reducing routes or increasing UNT routes. In fact, we are reducing redundancy of our routes so that we can increase our frequency. The UNT Shuttle is open to the public. I admit that DCTA has not done a great job communicating that. Those routes serve the major apartment complexes at a very high frequency. By eliminating Connect service that overlaps with UNT Shuttle Service, we are able to more Connect buses to run more frequently on other routes.

As a conservative, you can appreciate our efforts to increase efficiency and reduce redundancy while also improving the frequency of our services for all of our passengers and extending the hours of operation. I hope more people will attend our meetings so that we can better explain our position.

See this article on Fox News & USA Today

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