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Free trolley serves vulnerable people

Please, keep the trolley free. Anyone who doubts why, take a free ride for yourself – then you see the need. Every 20 minutes, it loops from the Transit Center to the Iron Horse Inn (past Oxbow Park where there is no parking) and back downtown. Try different times of the day. Durango should be proud of its free trolley and promote it more. We also could be pleased with many other of Durango’s progressive ideas: our traffic flows smoothly and pedestrian improvements abound. We have parks/trails, museums/galleries, music/lecture halls, lovely neighborhoods/ski areas, library/college, hospital/Horse Gulch Health Center, rec center and Chapman Hill complex that more than prove what a great place Durango is to live.

But some among us are so beat down by life they can barely lift their heads to see the beauty. They are hopeless, despairing, yet still with infants and children to somehow keep alive with cold food in cold cars that don’t run. This is not good. Mostly the poor – working and non – remain invisible in our community until events like last Saturday’s Four Corners Veterans Stand Down at La Plata County Fairgrounds. For one day, to anyone watching, the homeless and near-homeless became visible, thus human again. If your heart doesn’t hurt at the sight, it should. Public-aid agencies do not, and cannot afford to, give out transit passes willy-nilly.

And regardless, for various reasons, many of our poorest are no longer in any system that distributes free passes. The stresses on the bottom quarter of our population are enough to unravel a person already. The last thing poor people need is to pay $1 every time they need to get to or from town – half that for each child. The free trolley supports the underclass in more ways than we can imagine or know. Please, because it is so very necessary/efficient/cool, keep the trolley free. Please.

Sue Petranek

Durango



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