Rashad Williams can cook his ass off.

The 33-year-old head chef at Bralie’s Sports Bar and Grill on Hillsborough Road didn’t attend culinary school. He learned at his grandmother’s knee. In addition to the burger and fries on the menu, he prepares on-demand dishes like a Shepherd’s pie with rich, brown gravy drizzling down its modulated sides and a chicken pot pie with a puffed pastry—one of his favorites.

He’s been working at Bralie’s for a little over a year, making $14 an hour. He doesn’t own a car because he has epilepsy. So each morning, he took GoDurham’s 11B bus, which stopped in front of his apartment on Chapel Hill Street, near the ghost bike memorial, at 9:30 a.m. The bus dropped him off at an intersection a few yards from work just before his 10:00 a.m. shift. It cost him a dollar. 

But one morning in late January, the 11B didn’t show up. It didn’t show up the next day, either.

On January 25, with little or no notice, GoDurham discontinued the route. Williams had to start using Uber. That first trip cost $10, he says. But the prices have gone up. Earlier this week, he says, he paid $16. 

“A one-way trip, $26,” he says. “Let me get some groceries with that.”

Sean Egan, Durham’s new director of transportation, says the city rerouted about 20 lines because of low ridership. The Hillsborough Road line, for instance, made 12 trips each weekday, but only averaged two boardings each trip, Egan says. 

To accommodate riders inconvenienced by the changes, the city began piloting a new program on February 5: East Durham Connect. If it works, the city says, it could make transportation both easier for residents and cheaper for the city. 

Instead of waiting for hourly bus boardings, riders in a few East Durham neighborhoods with disrupted service can use their phones to immediately summon a Lyft six days a week. With an access code, the Lyft will take them to work and other destinations—including bus stops and shopping centers—along the discontinued route for free.

City spokeswoman Beverly Thompson says the pilot program is expected to run through June and perhaps into next year. Egan says GoDurham is considering deploying the program in other areas—including the old 11B route, which now stops at a subdivision entrance off of Neal Road, more than a mile from Bralie’s.

None of that helps Rashad Williams right now. 

To catch the bus these days, he has to wake up an hour early and walk a mile to a bus stop near downtown. He huffs a little over a mile again when the bus that used to stop yards from his gig drops him off at Neal Road. Sometimes Bralie’s owner Leslie Crabtree gives Williams and a co-worker a ride to the bus stop. 

“I don’t want them to have to walk,” Crabtree says.

The pilot program is part of an emerging policy Mayor Steve Schewel laid out in his State of the City address last week. In that speech, Schewel connected the legacy of racism to the climate crisis, poverty, housing, crime, racial equity, and public transit in Durham. 

Already, Schewel said, climate change has hit Durham’s black residents the hardest in several ways. Historically redlined black neighborhoods are still bereft of tree cover, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be poor, unhealthy, and lack access to medical care, which means they’re also more susceptible to the effects of extreme heat. 

The death of light rail last year, Schewel continued, was a “severe blow” to the region’s efforts to create an environmentally sustainable transit system. But he acknowledged that rail would have primarily served whiter, wealthier residents. Most of the city’s nearly 21,000 bus boardings each weekday, on the other hand, come from people of color. 

“We must prioritize our bus system and the people who ride it,” Schewel said. Even under “the most optimistic scenarios, we will not see regional transportation on the ground for at least 10 years.”

After Duke University pulled the plug on light rail, one question has lingered: What’s going to happen to the $30 million in annual sales tax revenue the county collected for the ill-fated project?

On Monday, the Durham County Board of Commissioners allocated more than $2 million from that fund to begin studying a commuter rail line between Durham and Clayton. GoTriangle, which is overseeing the project, says it will next ask Wake County for $6 million and Johnston County for $250,000. The route, which is expected to cost between $1.4 billion and $1.8 billion, would make 20 trips and carry 7,500 to 10,000 passengers a day.

City transportation officials have also asked county commissioners that another $26 million be dedicated to improving GoDurham. 

Egan says that prior to creating a bus-service improvement plan, the city conducted on-board surveys with riders traveling to and from their destinations. Officials followed up by hosting about 80 events across the city—with a particular eye toward engaging hard-to-reach Latinx residents—where they listened to concerns about bus service. 

The big takeaway, Egan says: People want improvements now. 

There will be “more requests [from the transportation department] than there is money” in the Capital Transit Fund, he adds. 

The city’s request includes $10 million from the fund for improvements along Fayetteville Street, such as increasing frequency so that buses arrive every 15 minutes, adding more shelters and benches, and creating boarding areas large enough for strollers and wheelchairs. Another $6 million will go to purchase electric buses, and $1.1 million will be allocated to add service during off-peak times. 

The city has 1,000 bus stops, Egan says, and the city wants to improve all of them, 50 at a time.

None of that helps Teddy Hall right now, either. 

Hall, a 51-year-old cook at Bralie’s, is on his feet all day. To catch the 11B at Neal Road, he has to walk more than a mile down Bennett Memorial Road, a rural stretch that doesn’t have sidewalks. He walks on the shoulder or out on the street. 

“Which is pretty darn dangerous,” Hall says. “Especially when I leave here at 10 o’clock at night.”

He says the Lyft vouchers sound cool, but he doesn’t think they’re the best solution. 

“I think it would be more convenient if the bus stops here,” he says. “That would be more convenient for me. Right now, I’m being inconvenienced and having to come out of pocket, but my taxes are being used to pay for service and salaries. But we’re the ones being inconvenienced.”

Before Route 11B was discontinued, a GoDurham bus stopped near the Vocational Rehabilitation Center on Western Park Place, where residents with physical, mental, learning disabilities, or emotional impairments are given training that helps them obtain or maintain employment.

Now the center’s clients, many of whom have mobility limitations or use adaptive equipment, have an additional challenge: They can’t make it to a bus stop that’s over a mile away, says Kelly Haight, a spokeswoman with the state Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the center.

Consequently, they’ve missed appointments and orientation sessions “and now must rely on email and phone calls, which can be frustrating and more difficult for the population we serve,” Haight told the INDY in an email.

Haight says the vocational services staff has made adjustments, but the route changes resulted in “an increase in missed appointments,” with staffers “spending more time traveling, which limits the number of persons that can be served in a day.”

The center has been in the same location for 40 years, Haight says. 

“The population here already has a number of obstacles to overcome in trying to obtain and achieve employment,” she says, “and restricted access to services makes it more difficult for them to achieve their goals.”  

Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected]. This story has been updated to include the Board of Commissioners’ vote on Monday night. 

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