When the blue Dial-A-Ride bus trundles up to the corner of Academy Lane, I wave to my driver Mary Rivera. She smiles and waves back.
“Are you my rider today?” she asks.
I am. One of many. DART’s three buses — or rather its two currently active ones — act as a hybrid school bus and taxi service, providing transportation to and from four local primary schools, the Hillsdale High Rise apartments, and the adjacent HillTop apartments. The bus service also runs bimonthly trips to Wal-Mart. Additionally, individual pickups can be arranged by phone, often to places like local residences and the grocery store.
The buses operate within city limits from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, serving an average of 150 to 180 passengers per day, according to a March 2017 Collegian article. Nearby cities such as Coldwater and Jackson run similar services, but seven days a week with more buses and significantly longer hours.
A necessary service
Although many people ride DART buses daily, the program’s funding could pose future monetary issues for the city, which is trying to tighten its budget however possible. But right now, the service is necessary. At a Feb. 19 meeting, the Hillsdale City Council adopted a motion to continue to fund DART for the coming fiscal year.
According to Mayor Adam Stockford, 18 percent of DART’s funding comes from the federal government and 40 percent from the state government (including grants in 2017 to partner with Key Opportunities’ transportation program and to order two new buses). The City of Hillsdale provides the remaining 42 percent, which typically falls in the range of $100,000 to $140,000. DART draws this money from the city’s general fund.
“That doesn’t mean that’s what we’ll actually spend,” City Finance Director Bonnie Tew said in reference to DART’s allotted budget. “It’s an accounting thing, but part of that money comes back to the general fund — about $55,000 of it.”
Tew said DART ridership has increased in the past few months because of the intensely cold weather and overall ridership has been up over the past year.
But the question remains how to keep funding DART in the future. At the meeting, Councilman Bruce Sharp suggested asking either Wal-Mart or the incoming Meijer to help fund bus rides, since DART already takes customers on shopping expeditions. Both Kroger and Market House already buy tickets from the city so that employees without cars can get to work.
Tew said that she’s looking into the possibility of asking Wal-Mart to help fund DART trips, using the advent of Meijer (and thereby possible customer attrition) as a bid to enlist the superstore’s assistance.
At the discussion’s conclusion, Stockford said he was wary of public transportation for a city as small as Hillsdale, but that he believed in the necessity of DART, if only because so many children use it to get to school in the morning. He later added in an email that three of the four primary schools in the city don’t provide transportation, making DART useful for a significant number of parents.
“We were talking about goals — and education as one of our goals — so I think if we were ever to end the public transportation system, we would have a significant problem on our hands,” he said at the meeting. “This is not an endorsement of public transport, but it is the world we live in.”
A storied bus
Now, as we lurch away from my stop, I get to know the world of DART in fits and starts.
Rivera had picked me up on a street corner near Hillsdale Academy, where a kindergartner just boarded on his way home at 1 p.m. I wait for breaks in noisy jolts over potholes to yell questions to the front of the bus. For most of the ride, I am the only passenger in the 15-passenger bus in the lull of a school-day afternoon.
“We clock in at 7:15 and start doing school runs, and then we do the Key Opportunities people, the handicapped people who work up there,” Rivera says. “Then we just wait for the dispatcher to get calls, and that’s what we do all day long.”
The routine is similar to what DART driving has been since the beginning. Hillsdale residents Richard and Sharon Dix started a taxi company in the early 1970s and then bought a small red bus before the program began to receive state funding in 1975. At its peak, DART had five drivers, but it’s currently making do with two full-time drivers, with a third out on medical leave.
“I like it. It’s a good job. I like the people that ride,” Rivera says. “Mostly it’s the young kids — I like all their stories.”
Rivera has driven for DART for almost two years; “the other girls” — bus drivers Cheryl Cox and Sandy Young — 18 and 19 years. Along with their dispatcher, Susan Kehn, they make up the entire staff of DART.
“I like helping the handicapped people,” Rivera says. “It’s a bit stressful right now because we’re down a bus, but overall it’s a nice job.”
Bumping around town
Rivera has been tossing her answers back over her shoulder between stops. But now we’re parked by the Elks Lodge after empty queues at the two scheduled afternoon pickups for south-bound passengers at the Hillsdale High Rise and the HillTop apartments. The impromptu bus stop is vacant except for a woman in a parka and pink hat walking our way.
“We had three buses, and most of the people at the High Rise complex would like to go out at 1:30 and do their shopping,” Rivera says. “But now, with only two buses —”
The woman in pink knocks on the door.
“Hi, how are you?” Rivera says. “Enjoying the sunshine?”
“You waiting for someone here?” the woman says.
“Yeah, just waiting for a call.”
“Okay, well, I’ve seen you here.”
They exchange pleasantries, and I wonder aloud why she didn’t board the bus.
“She’s one of the employees at Key Opportunities. We drive her around a lot.”
Rivera’s friend just wanted to say hi, then.
“Okay, go ahead,” Rivera says to Susan Kehn, the dispatcher, who had relayed a message during this conversation. “…10-4.”
The DART dispatch lingo flies past me, but Rivera has moved on to explaining DART’s raison d’être: “Most people that ride, they definitely need the service, and they definitely need the help, so they’re really grateful we’re helping them, and they’re helping us, too,” Rivera says. “But they definitely need something for the hours we’re closed. And we only stay inside the city limits. I know a lady who works at Glei’s Orchards that’s out on Willowbrook Road, and her husband passed away. She doesn’t drive, so now she’s got a hard time getting rides out there.
“Well, we better get going.”
Among the elderly
It’s 1:30 p.m., time for the northbound run from Hillsdale High Rise. This time, someone is waiting on the sidewalk.
“Here’s a rider. Going north?”
This is Anna Keefer, 73. Rivera gets up to help her with her walker, and Keefer’s talking before Rivera’s out the door.
“It’s so hard to keep up, these days,” Keefer says. She’s taking DART to the Department of Health and Human Services for some help paying a lighting bill.
“I have a government phone for calls, and I get coupons to buy groceries, but sometimes it’s still too much,” she says.
Keefer drove herself around until two years ago, when she got her knees redone. Now she mostly gets around via walker. Members of the United Methodist church often pick her up on Sundays.
“I’m so thankful for DART. I get to go downtown to the senior center, the fitness center, and sometimes I get lunch,” Keefer says. “I enjoy the rides and the scenery. The girls are patient and caring, like in the winters when we need help getting off the bus.”
Another woman boards on her way to bingo with her husband at the nursing home.
“And two times a month they take us to Wal-Mart. They pick us up at 9:30 a.m., and we’re there until 11:30 a.m.,” Keefer says. “It’s really neat because you can get lunch there at the Wal-Mart while you’re shopping.”
Rivera drops off Keefer, with whom I’ve started a harrowing conversation about bedbugs at the High Rise apartments, and the other passenger at their respective destinations; “Sue said to be back out at 2:30 p.m.,” says the latter. Keefer won’t be more than an hour.
Kehn’s voice comes over the walkie-talkie with a call-in pickup at Kroger grocery store: “She gets off at 2:00 p.m., so 2:05 p.m.”
“Sue’s our captain,” Rivera says. “You ever get a chance to go see the dispatch station, do it. She’s juggling three routes and holding us all together. She’s what makes Dial-A-Ride happen.”
On the way, Kehn digs around in the archives at the dispatcher’s office and sends her findings to Rivera in bursts: When did Dial-A-Ride get turned over to the state? “June 10, 1975.” How do you spell Dix? “That’s right.”
Learning the lingo
I’ve been dying to ask, and since the bus is empty, I do: What are the numbers Rivera uses to start all her messages to Kehn?
If she has a passenger, it’s “16 to base.” After drop-off, it’s 20. Nobody in the DART bus? That’s a 24.
“In the past, we were so busy that when we were close to, say, the Market House, we could give dispatchers an idea of where we were at,” Rivera says.
It’s not that the DART buses aren’t busy, especially with their third driver out on medical leave, but there’s a rhythm to the rushes: “The first of the month, we’re always crazy busy, because the first and third of the month is when they get their checks. So that’s when they can do their shopping. But you just never know,” Rivera says.
Rivera says Kroger pickups are allowed to bring three bags on the bus, because it’s often crowded. But since it’s the only way they can get groceries home, Rivera says she’s often lenient.
DART tries to accommodate its diverse customer bases by keeping their time schedules separate, since some seniors don’t like riding with noisy kids. That means she “trains” seniors to be out on the town in the late morning and early afternoon.
“We used to call Wednesday Wheelchair Wednesday, because the people in wheelchairs would go out on Wednesday,” Rivera says. “But anymore, I don’t even know about that.”
She grabs up her walkie-talkie: “Okay, since I’m here, you may as well give me my school calls.”
Kehn lists 11 home addresses for students from Hillsdale Preparatory School. Cheryl Cox, the other active DART driver, usually picks up 12 to 15 students from Will Carleton Academy.
As for the mini-school bus service is popular, despite the fact that parents have to pay, because some schools don’t provide transportation, because some parents don’t want their children on the large buses, or because of some students have had disciplinary issues on other school buses.
Smoke break
Fort DART, though, $1.50 from each student and senior, and $3.00 for adults, doesn’t make anyone rich. And neither does the $4.50 fare from the Kroger employee who, Rivera tells me as we drive up, lives out of town and takes DART home every day she works.
We pull up to her smoking a clove cigarette at 2:03 p.m. She boards with a bag from Shoe Carnival and jokes that Rivera’s early arrival cut off her smoke break.
“I was just trying to save your lungs,” Rivera says.
Rivera is doing that in more ways than one; the employee (who preferred to remain anonymous), says that while she loves walking her dog around town, “I live out past the fairgrounds, so it would take me an hour and 45 minutes to walk home. I’ve been fortunate to have Dial-A-Ride.”
The mornings she works early shifts are trickier: “Sometimes I get a ride from a girlfriend, but she goes to work at 5:30 p.m., and then I’m waiting around Kroger until 7. Or my boyfriend will take me around, but he lives out of town, too,” she says. “We need a taxi. The one we had a couple years ago was great. It only lasted about 4 or 5 months, though.”
Something about tax problems, she supposes. This summer, Hillsdale had a one-man Uber business until the driver’s wife took a job elsewhere.
School’s out
But Dial-A-Ride seems like the transportation business that mobilizes the Hillsdale citizens who need it most. After 2:03 p.m., Rivera and I manage four more stops before she drops me off downtown en route to her 2:40 p.m. pickup at the Hillsdale College Dow Conference Center.
And soon, I imagine, back to Hillsdale Prep: School’s almost out.
I wish I could have seen Rivera greeted by her Prep school students, chattery with the prospect of heading home on a blustery March afternoon.
I hope they had all sorts of stories for her.