Leslie Hart has been driving nearly all his life, and on a chilly Friday morning in February, not much has changed for the 80-year-old.
Weekday mornings for the past nine years, Hart has driven 26 miles from his Heltonville home to his job as a Bloomington Public Transportation Corp. bus driver.
Hart, who wears a black baseball cap emblazoned with “Jesus” and is a pastor in Bedford on the weekends, waves to every fellow bus driver he passes as he drives along his favorite designated route, Route 9.
“I drive to try and stay active,” the part-time bus driver said. “I’ve been a driver all my life and I really have liked it. I like working with people.”
Hart is one of 76 drivers with the publicly funded transportation company. On his route, his ridership is made up predominantly of Indiana University students, who help boost Bloomington Transit’s ridership numbers. But ridership as a whole for such public services is on a downward trend.
From 2016 to 2017, Bloomington Transit lost 4.13 percent of its ridership, the sharpest decrease in the past decade. That decrease, however, is less than what most cities are experiencing.
According to annual reports from the Indiana Department of Transportation, Bloomington has the best ridership retention rate compared with other cities’ systems that average more than 1 million miles a year. From 2016 to 2017, Terre Haute ridership decreased nearly 19 percent, South Bend decreased nearly 6 percent and Lafayette decreased 4.42 percent, for example.