Public Transit

As your State Representative, I will fight to:

1. Oppose RIPTA budget cuts that will reduce service and threaten drivers’ jobs—and reverse previous cuts.

   In recent years, RIPTA has been defunded and forced to cut service as a result, with weekend and evening service being eliminated on some routes and others seeing frequencies drop to the point at which they are practically useless. If the bus you need is now only coming once every 80 minutes instead of every half hour, you’re going to have to start looking into more expensive and less environmentally friendly alternatives very quickly. Future cuts threaten to exacerbate these problems even further and put drivers at risk of losing their jobs.

2. Oppose moving the bus hub away from Kennedy Plaza.

   Public services should be designed to serve the members of the public who need them, and RIPTA riders overwhelmingly oppose relocating the bus hub. Why would we ever undertake an expensive, time-consuming, labor-intensive project to make public transit less convenient and accessible?

3. Repeal the law that made Peter Alviti, the architect of the Washington Bridge crisis, the chair of the RIPTA Board.

   In 2023, Rep. Ajello voted for a controversial law that installed the Director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation as Chair of the RIPTA Board. That role should be reserved for a transit expert and advocate who can make it their top priority, not someone who has to balance it with all the competing responsibilities of being RIDOT Director.

   • Even a pro-transit RIDOT Director would struggle to manage that additional responsibility. Between former Director Alviti’s record of opposition to transit and his refusal to take accountability for the Washington Bridge crisis, it’s clear that he shouldn’t have been placed in a position of authority over our public transit system—or over anything else.

4. Expand RIPTA service by reallocating existing state revenue streams and making additional one-time investments.

   I support increasing RIPTA’s annual funding by allocating to it the revenue from the rideshare tax and raising the share of the Highway Maintenance Account available to RIPTA to align with federal standards. Transit advocates estimate that these two tweaks would add $20-$25 million to transit funding at no new cost to taxpayers.

   • I am also in favor of a one-time capital improvement bond that would fund the Transit Master Plan (but not the bus hub relocation). These funding increases will make RIPTA more user-friendly by making buses run more quickly and efficiently, increasing service frequency, adding new routes, and adding tap-to-pay credit card readers to eliminate the confusion and delays caused by passengers fumbling around for cash or struggling with the WAVE app.