A T rider boards a bus on Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017 at the downtown bus hub at Seventh and Vermont streets.
It has been 20 years since Lawrence debuted its bus service, and with a new transit center and route redesign on the horizon, city leaders say decisions made in the next year will be pivotal for the service’s future.
The city marked the transit system’s 20th anniversary this month, but the idea of a citywide bus system had been talked about long before the first buses went into service. By the time the City Commission approved spending property tax revenues for the service in 1999, which together with federal and state transportation funding got the service started, it had been a topic of discussion for more than a decade, according to newspaper archives. As with many government decisions, there were critics, but when the choice to continue funding the service with a special sales tax was put to voters in 2008 and again in 2017, the answer was a resounding yes.