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Some bus companies want special lanes on city streets; others are smugly sitting back on their deficits, confident that city governments will ultimately subsidize or buy them out. But no city wants to take over a white elephant; most municipalities are already hard-pressed to make ends meet. National City Lines, a Chicago holding company that controls some 40 transit companies in U.S. cities, e.g., Sacramento. Baltimore, Salt Lake City, has a standing offer to sell its companies to municipalities if it can continue to operate them, has yet to find a buyer.
The real solution is keeping, or winning back old passengers. Where this has been given a fair trial, it works. By providing fast service on a low (7¢) fare, educating its drivers in good passenger relations, New Orleans Public Service Inc. has kept passenger decline for the last three years to 2% or less. The city-owned Cleveland Transit System, which turned in an operating surplus for eight of the last ten years, has just opened an eight-mile rapid-transit rail line from the Union Terminal to East Cleveland, expects to bring in passengers by cutting 16 minutes off an old 34-minute bus ride. After Cleveland replaced streetcars on one route with a premium-fare (25¢ ). guaranteed-seat, super-express bus service, riders tripled. Cleveland Transit System General Manager Donald Hyde, who is also president of the American Transit Association, believes speed is transit's answer not only to the decline in passenger traffic but to rising costs. Says he: "If we can increase average speed one m.p.h., we save $1,000,000 a year."