Anchorage should honor working class by keeping holiday bus service

National holidays. Who doesn’t love them? Hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Patriotic marches and flags on Veterans’ Day. A time to honor the workforce on Labor Day. Each holiday provides an opportunity to reflect, give thanks, and spend time with friends and family. Each holiday is something to look forward to. Something to look forward to, that is, if you get the day off.

Many don’t. While the rest of us celebrate, retail workers, food service employees and home health aides put in another long day with low pay. Ironically, holidays can contribute to workers’ hardship. On holidays, when the Municipality of Anchorage parks its buses for the day, our city’s lowest paid workers must overcome the challenge of getting to work.

I was reminded of this in October, when a relative mentioned he had to depart for his retail job earlier than normal. He has never held a driver’s license and probably never will. He depends on public transportation to commute to work. On Veterans’ Day, he had to leave his apartment an hour early, because his bus route had been suspended for the holiday. In other words, he had to walk. This doubled his already lengthy commute time, which involves both the People Mover and a fair bit of walking. Workers like my relative have few transportation options on holidays. They must allow extra time to walk to and from work, often in the dark, or they can take a cab, which eats up a significant portion of their day’s earnings. Holidays offer workers like my relative nothing to celebrate.

The People Mover’s online bus schedule shows no bus service on 11 holidays throughout 2020. That’s 11 days we create obstacles and hardship for some members of our community who must work. This oversight by the municipality needs to be corrected. Now is the time. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, when essential workers are stressed, but are needed like never before. Now is the time to reinstate holiday bus service.

In less than six weeks, we’ll celebrate Martin Luther King Day. During the civil rights movement, public transportation, at times, became the center of social and racial protest. What better way to honor our nation’s greatest civil rights leader than to provide public transportation for those who go unrecognized?

Rather than shutdown bus routes on MLK Day, the municipality should maintain regular routes to accommodate those who need to get to work, or who wish to partake in the celebration, or who simply want to take a trip across town on their day off.

Six weeks is time enough for the municipality to plan ahead. On Jan. 18, let’s make Anchorage a city Dr. King would be proud of. Run the full fleet of People Mover buses, even if it means paying holiday bonuses to the deserving bus drivers and mechanics and maintenance workers who keep the bus system operating. And then let’s reinstate public bus service on every holiday thereafter.

The hot dogs will taste that much better and the fireworks will appear even more spectacular knowing we’ve provided for those essential workers who provide for all of us.

Thomas Pease was born in Anchorage, where he teaches in the public school system.

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