Cedric Ye has become a fixture of the Rhode Island transit advocacy scene. He talked to ecoRI News reporter and Blab Lab host Colleen Cronin about the problems and opportunities he sees in the Ocean State’s public transportation system.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Colleen Cronin 

Welcome to Blab Lab, a monthly podcast from reporters of ecoRI News, where we unpack the critical environmental issues facing southern New England. I’m reporter Colleen Cronin. Today we’re talking about the bus.

If you’ve been watching the news or reading our newsletter, you might know that the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority is facing a fiscal cliff, a $10 million budget deficit in the coming fiscal year that the agency is trying to cover by cutting service across the board. Of the 67 routes RIPTA operates, the agency is proposing cuts or reductions in service to 58 lines. Although the problem is coming to a head this summer, budget issues have plagued RIPTA for years. The governor’s office has called the choice to leave the agency at a deficit, a “rightsizing” of the authority, but advocates say the cuts are a result of years of underfunding.

On the show today, we have one of those advocates. Cedric Ye, a 17-year-old transit rider who’s become a fixture at RIPTA board meetings, Statehouse hearings, and rallies for transit, is going to share his perspective on the historic cuts and what they’ll mean for Rhode Island.

Hey, Cedric, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Cedric Ye

Thank you so much for having me,

Colleen Cronin

Cedric. I’ve known you now for a couple of years. I know who you are, but do you mind just kind of giving us a little spiel about who are you?

Cedric Ye 

Sure. I’m Cedric, I’m 17. I’m a high school student. I live in Providence. I’m involved with quite a few transit advocacy groups, especially Rhode Island Transit Riders and the Providence Streets Coalition, who run the Save RIPTA campaign at the Statehouse. I’ve been involved for a couple years. I don’t know if I really like transit.

Colleen Cronin 

Well, what else do you like besides transit?

Cedric Ye 

Um…

Colleen Cronin

You really do like transit!

Cedric Ye

When I was making my college list, I realized how hard it was to talk about myself, so I’m just going to think of that. I guess I’m involved with my school’s robotics team and also math team and physics team, because I’m kind of a nerd.

Colleen Cronin

We love nerds on the Blab Lab. I consider myself one, too.

Cedric Ye 

Yeah, I just like going places. I guess I’m interested in urban planning that kind of spiraled out as a branch of liking public transit. So I like to do biking a lot. I do quite a bit of Safe Streets advocacy as well. I kind of got passed down, like the suburban conception of what are the good neighborhoods and the bad neighborhoods. And riding public transit made me realize that the quote, unquote bad neighborhoods, which usually are urban areas that have a predominantly high percentage of people of color there, they’re not bad at all. They’re actually great. I love the food, and so I guess sometimes in my free time, I just make a point of going to one of the neighborhoods that I guess I’ve been told not to go to and explore and meet people and try food, and I usually bike, though, or take the bus.

Colleen Cronin

Yeah, you’re kind of answering my next question, but how do you use public transit?

Cedric Ye 

Aside from that, I guess, I mean, I don’t have a driver’s license.

Colleen Cronin 

Big choice as a 17-year-old. I remember itching to get my driver’s license when I was your age.

Cedric Ye 

All of my friends are the same way. I think I must be the last kid in my class who has not. I guess it’s like, I’m fortunate, where I guess alternatives to driving, RIPTA, biking, all kind of at the edge of being a viable alternative to driving. That’s something that I had to use before I turned 16, because I wasn’t allowed to drive. And I guess I learned how to use it and how it worked for me, and I found that it was good enough. Driving is really annoying to do. Everyone complains about Driver’s Ed, like how much time it takes, how it’s so expensive. Getting your license is expensive. Getting insured as a minor is really expensive.

Colleen Cronin

It is definitely expensive.

Cedric Ye

And I guess I’m really fortunate to have the ability to have the option to do so, I think, like I guess the majority of most, many students, tend to, I guess not have that option. I think even in many parts of Providence, it just suddenly makes less sense. And I guess the itching to get a driver’s license is because if you grow up in a place where there aren’t viable alternatives, you just cannot go anywhere, you cannot participate in society. And I guess getting a driver’s license is the symbol of having the mobility and independence to do what you want. I guess having RIPTA enabled me to feel that way, even before I turned 16, to be independent and get involved in stuff a lot sooner.

Colleen Cronin

When did you start taking RIPTA?

Cedric Ye

My deep, dark secret is that I used to live in the suburbs.

Colleen Cronin

Deep, dark secret, deep, deep, dark secret…

Cedric Ye 

I was interested in public transit, but only took it on like very occasional weekend outings. I think actually, the time I started taking RIPTA, was kind of because it just started making the most sense for me to take RIPTA by myself. I think it was to the summer tennis camps in Barrington.

Colleen Cronin

The 60?

Cedic Ye

Yeah, the 60, yeah. I got to cross Wampanoag Trail on foot where it’s like, it’s basically a divided highway. And I guess so. I think it was probably the summer before freshman year, I want to say.

Colleen Cronin 

Wow. So you would have been like 13, 14, around then.

Cedric Ye 

Yeah something like that, wow.

Colleen Cronin 

There’s a lot of older folks who tend to go to public hearings. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it is sometimes really surprising when you see someone young, especially you were probably, like, 15 at the time, getting up there and talking like, I don’t know if I could have done that when I was 15. Then you had, you know, really interesting and well-thought-out things to say. And I remember wanting to get your email so that I could reach out to you and chat with you. And I remember all the professional advocates being like, yeah, we got to get this guy, in the folds of it, so, or maybe they already knew you, I don’t know. But when did you like, take this love of transit and this, practical use of transit and make it, make it advocacy? Because I would say you’re out there, you’re an advocate.

Cedric Ye

I think this is something that I’ve struggled to, I guess, think about, because it’s been such a… it’s just been like that for a long time. I’ve loved to train since I was eight, but at a certain point, being involved with like, just like train enthusiast groups, I was introduced to a lot of online content about the actual implications of car dependency, environmental impact, social justice impact, economic impact. I had already had a conception of what works in public transit and what doesn’t, and thinking like if only the policy makers knew about the ideas, then everything would be great. I dug up some old emails that I sent to MBTA customer service when I was 8, saying — they were very bad emails and very bad proposals, but it’s OK.

Colleen Cronin

Do you remember your proposals?

Cedric Ye

Yeah, one of them was creating a new bus route that went from the Bowdoin Station to Kenmore through MIT. And I think that was just because the red-blue connector still doesn’t exist. And I wanted it to exist, but then…

Colleen Cronin

Yeah, you kind of got to walk from MGH to Bowdoin if you want to get there, right? Red, that’s the only way?

Cedric Ye

Walking or doing a triple transfer.

Colleen Cronin

Triple transfer?

Cedric Ye

Yeah a triple transfer, three seat ride…

Colleen Cronin

So it seemed like it was kind of a blurry line then for you, when it became advocacy. Because you were kind of advocating for better service even when you were 8?

Cedric Ye 

There was definitely a line. There was a point where I wanted to join advocacy and then I didn’t really know how, and then I guess I had the opportunity to join Transit Matters in Boston. I worked on the Regional Rail campaign. That was a really exciting experience to, finally, I guess, put some of my enthusiasm into something.

Colleen Cronin

Can you talk a little bit about what was the regional train campaign?

Cedric Ye

A regional rail. So, like American commuter rail systems tend to be, it’s like you have a diesel locomotive with a bunch of coaches. It’s the, “We’re going to take all the suburban commuters into the city for their 9-to-5 jobs, then take them out at the end of the day.” A lot of other cities globally run the commuter rail system basically like a subway with electric trains that come every few minutes. And so that was envisioning what would that look like? And I guess I was interested in it, because I would take the commuter rail to Boston, and it would take too long and come every two hours, and I’d be sad.

Colleen Cronin

If you miss it, you’ve got to wait. It’s tough.

Cedric Ye 

I had also wanted to take my advocacy more local. So I think it was probably, I guess, kind of because of a kind of a chance encounter with Rep. Tanzi on a Statehouse field trip. She introduced me to someone at RIPTA. I got the incredible opportunity to tour the RIPTA headquarters.

Colleen Cronin 

Oh, very cool. I haven’t been able to do that. It’s very cool.

Cedric Ye 

It’s very cool, and then one of the RIPTA planners introduced me to Rhode Island Transit Riders. And I guess that’s how I got started getting involved at the Rhode Island level.

Colleen Cronin 

I wonder, because you know a lot about this. I think you know more about this than I do. How would you describe what’s going on with RIPTA right now?

Cedric Ye

I think it’s basically the consequences of multiple decades of chronic underfunding, all kinds of things showing their ugly heads at the same time. Because RIPTA’s budget has actually, if you account for inflation, it has shrunk since 2013 I think, and likely beyond that. RIPTA’s funding model isn’t even indexed to inflation, and so for the past 10 years, they’ve been fishing for couch change to keep the service alive. They’ve been incredibly successful at managing how underfunded they are.

Colleen Cronin

What would you say to the governor’s argument that this is cutting down on some service that’s not very efficient, like some service to rural areas, or some service that isn’t seeing a lot of riders.

Cedric Ye

I wonder when was the last time he asked RIDOT to be efficient with the money that they spent on the TF Green Airport highway signs, or when he asked our public libraries to be efficient? Or when he asked himself to be efficient before giving $15 million in tax breaks to Citizens Bank. I mean, there was the fact that RIPTA is one of the most financially efficient agencies of its size in the country. But it’s also, it’s also definitely held to a different standard than most state agencies. But then there’s also the fact that the “low efficiency routes” are like the ones that go to our rural communities. They are lifelines for the people that use them. Public services are not supposed to be efficient. They’re supposed to serve the public, and that includes when it’s hard to or might cost more. But there’s also the fact that the “low efficiency” routes help make RIPTA’s busy and well performing routes busier, because people can choose to use RIPTA because it’s actually a comprehensive network, and not just a Providence one, where they know that if they have to go outside Providence, even if they only do so occasionally, they can rely on it. A friend that I know lives on the 66 and primarily just goes to Providence. They don’t take the 69 very often, but they like the ability.

Colleen Cronin

The 69 is one of the routes that’s going to be affected.

Cedric Ye

Yeah, they’re going to lose access to the local library. That’s why they use it; they don’t go to the library every day, but there’s no other way of getting to that library.

Colleen Cronin

So not to keep bringing up the fact that you’re a young person, because I think you offer perspective despite your age. But as a young Rhode Islander and as a student, why do you feel transit is so important?

Cedric Ye

I mean, how else would I get around? I guess I could choose to get my driver’s license, go through all the processes, pay the apparently $12,000 cost per year that AAA says it costs to own a new car at this point I don’t want to drive. It’s a headache. And the places that I would like to live in are these sorts of places where you can walk, places where you have a convenience store around the corner, and those types of places are just not possible if everybody drives so you need public transit to have places like that. I think this is exemplified in I think Cameron LaFreniere had an op-ed in the Boston Globe about how he moved away from Providence to Philadelphia. Because, I mean, for young tech workers like him, he wanted to be somewhere where there were alternatives to driving.

Colleen Cronin 

You mentioned college a little bit earlier, and I don’t want to ask you too many questions about that, because I know that’s very stressful. But are you thinking about other schools and places that maybe do have more comprehensive transit systems, and do you think that if the cuts happen, you would consider going out of state?

Cedric Ye

Honestly? At the moment, none of the schools that I’m applying to are in-state.

Colleen Cronin

Oh, okay, never mind. You’re leaving anyway…

Cedric Ye 

Brown University doesn’t have civil engineering. And then URI, I mean, the URI admissions officer went to one of the RIPTA hearings and said the number one reason students don’t apply is because of bad transportation, because they feel isolated on the campus. I mean, right now, it would take less time for me to get to Northeastern than it would for me to get to URI. So it’s kind of like Massachusetts is kind of basically giving me an incentive.

Colleen Cronin

That’s without cuts? It’s quicker to get to Northeastern than it is to URI for you without cuts?

Cedric Ye

Yeah, right now, right now.

Colleen Cronin

So I wanted to talk about that a little bit. You spoke earlier about how, like it’s RIPTA and bicycling. Biking is probably the way that everyone else says, it’s kind of on the edge of being really useful. Like, you got here at our recording studio at LitArts RI in Providence, via bus. You got here way before I did, because you took the bus. Like, maybe can you walk us through how you planned your trip today? And how does RIPTA sort of sit on that edge of usefulness for you?

Cedric Ye

I kind of just pulled up the transit app I typed in my house. Very helpful. It’s very helpful. So when I would leave um, it happens that it took half an hour to get here. It probably would have been 20 minutes by bike, 10 minutes by car. That was with a 2-minute transfer at Kennedy Plaza. So if that hadn’t worked out, I would have gotten here half an hour later. That would have been OK, but so I guess this is what I worry about right now. There are quite a few edge cases where that works, like if that transfer didn’t work out, then I might have not chosen to take the bus here, because it would have taken 45 minutes instead. A lot of RIPTA  cuts involve reducing frequency of routes like mine. One of the routes that goes by my house, the 33 is going from every 30 to 40 minutes. The 34 is going from every 40 to 80 minutes. And so it’s like, it’s not just that. It’s adding 10 or 20 minutes to your commute time that could cause you to miss a connection at Kennedy Plaza and wait for like 45 minutes, so suddenly you’ve added 45 minutes to your trip time. That’s a lot, and this is one of my biggest concerns with these cuts. It’s not just that we are cutting service this one year. It’s been very well demonstrated. I think the APTA had this in a report from like 1990-something.

Colleen Cronin

APTA, can you just tell me what that is?

Cedric Ye

American Public Transit Association. I’m surprised I got that acronym right, but it’s the transit death spiral, because if you cut service, then less people use the bus, and that both cuts into fair revenue which will force further cuts, but also create an excuse for state leaders to justify further funding cuts.

Colleen Cronin

You were talking about the importance of public transit as a young person, as a student, as a young Rhode Islander, I want to shift back a little bit. I see you what feels like every week we say hello to each other at like a RIPTA a board meeting or, you know a rally that maybe the Save RIPTA campaign is doing at Kennedy Plaza, or during the session at the Statehouse. I see you at hearings in the Statehouse giving testimony, that’s a lot of advocacy, a lot of time, and you’re getting there on the bus. What has this last year, looked like for you in terms of your advocacy? How has the last year been for you in terms of your schedule with all this stuff?

Cedric Ye 

During the school year, it’s actually quite hard to attend some of those events, testifying at the Statehouse is OK. Block out a five-hour window of time. You’ll get three minutes sometime within that interval, and then you’ll get to go home.

Colleen Cronin 

It can be a long night there. What do you think’s the longest you’ve been at the Statehouse before?

Cedric Ye 

It’s probably maybe last year. I think I was there until eight, something. But that’s not the longest that I know of. I know this year’s House Finance hearing when they combined RIPTA with the top 1%.

Colleen Cronin

I was there. Oh, my God, I was there. I didn’t eat dinner until a very late hour. That was a long night. So it’s hard to do that when you’re a student, and you seem to be, I’m thinking, not skipping your homework based on the fact that you’re looking at these top schools and everything.

Cedric Ye 

When there’s a lobby day, I ask to leave my last class a minute early. I drop everything. I run. I ran to the Statehouse. I come late because the schedules don’t line up. I sometimes like doing my homework on the marble floors of the Statehouse. And I’ve never been able to attend a RIPTA board meeting.

There’s more hearings that I can attend. When the route cuts first dropped, when I went I was trying to fall asleep at night. I was thinking about the service cuts. I was thinking about arguments I would make, like advocacy ideas. My dad tells me I need to spend less time on RIPTA more time studying for the SAT.

Colleen Cronin 

More time like, you know, being a kid?

Cedric Ye 

That can wait.

Colleen Cronin

What is your prep?

Cedric Ye

It can vary. Sometimes it’s a lot. I’d say I usually like spending around an hour researching and writing for each three-minute comment that I get to make. I do have a Google doc titled in all caps, list of useful articles. And it’s a useful list of articles that it’s a bunch of, like articles and research that I’ve stumbled upon and thought it might be useful to have someday. And sometimes I pull from that. When I started, I was really not that much of a comfortable public speaker. I would get really nervous and not really remember what I would do, so I leaned very heavily on, I guess what I wrote beforehand. I guess I’ve tried to make myself more comfortable with just having bullet points. Actually, at the last board meeting, I had written a whole letter. I had written a whole thing and done my whole hour process about asking them to delay the vote, and then in the first minute, they delayed the votes. I spent it rewriting my testimony as the meeting went on.

Colleen Cronin

Yep, I think you were not alone in that. I think a lot of reporters had their lead written for that story and had to rewrite so you know, you’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. It’s obviously a lot of work, and it seems like you tend to be asking for the same things over and over again. Not even to mention improvements, like you’re sort of asking for a level of maintenance, right? And we can get to kind of what improvements would look like in the Transit Master Plan in a second, but like, I wanted to ask you, how are you feeling emotionally in this moment, after truly years of being a part of putting up a fight about keeping RIPTA funding, at least even?

Cedric Ye

There are parts of the advocacy that can be very fun and rewarding. I think especially RIPTA, it’s, it’s definitely speaks to how talented the RIPTA staff are that sometimes they put out improvements, like, I remember going to the hearing where they talked about adding the Amazon service and being really excited, or, like, the hearings about the Metro connector planning study to have light rail or bus rapid transit in the urban core. And that was really exciting. It’s always great to, I guess, chat with the RIPTA staff, talk about, like, the importance of public transit, how improvements could be transformative. And that makes going back to and groveling for funding for the basics, just keeping the existing service we have, even more frustrating, I think, especially with the fight recently, I guess, and the budget gap this year, I’ve just been hearing the same excuses made. RIPTA didn’t finish the efficiency study, and we told the state leaders that RIPTA is already efficient. The efficiency study’s done, it found that RIPTA is efficient, and now the governor is talking about right-sizing RIPTA, because ridership went down 25% which ignores the fact that service was cut by 27% in 2022 to 2023 alone. And I guess, to see what it’s like when the absolute transformative impact that improving public transit can do, and to see that in other places that are both of our neighbors, Massachusetts and Connecticut, are making historic investments in public transit right now, and to and to see RIPTA in this position when they are managed better than most of the other agencies, it is. It is quite frustrating at this point. For the last three weeks, I’ve been quite tired.

Colleen Cronin 

How are the RIPTA cuts going to affect you personally?

Cedric Ye

So I mean, especially after attending some of the public hearings, I consider myself to be in a very, very lucky position where the routes that I use to go to my high school are the 33 and 34. They’re getting some frequency cuts. So it’s like the 33 is getting cut from every 30 minutes to every 40 minutes. I’m only on the bus for 10 minutes. So that’s basically a doubling of the ride, and the span is getting cut. So I actually don’t know how late I’ll be able to stay at school. I don’t know if I’ll have to drop some like late night robotics practices and leave early, because that’s when the last bus is. And I mean, I guess the other option is, I’m very fortunate that I have an e-bike, so I guess it’s technically viable for me to e-bike to school, and I have done it in the snow. I also get sick.

Colleen Cronin

Does the e-bike work in the snow? I feel like the e-bike would struggle in the cold?

Cedric Ye 

I don’t really find it particularly safe to bike, especially in East Providence. Also, I get sick when it’s cold out. One time I got bronchitis from running cross-country in the rain. It’s like, my options are to get sick or have my commute take twice as long. I consider myself to be a very lucky rider. I used the 14 or the 69 to visit a friend in Narragansett. Narragansett is just losing all of the bus service. And in one of the Kingston hearings, I read about someone who wanted to attend, I think it was an apprenticeship program, sort of like a post high school career program at CCRI, and they just won’t be able to do that anymore. They said that their entire path forward has been ruined. And I mean, as I guess I’ve been as a high school student, I’ve been eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping, going to school for the last three years, every single class, it’s like, okay, well, how will this grade affect my ability to get into college? The thought of having all of that work just got thrown away because the governor has decided to prioritize building a big highway sign at T.F. Green Airport over funding RIPTA is kind of horrifying to me. It definitely does not make me want to stay in the state. I’ve hoped that I would want to come back to Rhode Island after college. I don’t know if I would want to when these service cuts happen, especially, I guess, as I mentioned earlier, like it’s not just the service cuts this year, not just this year, they could very well trigger a transit death spiral.

Colleen Cronin

So we just spoke a lot about the negatives and what could go wrong. To try to end on a more positive note. I always ask this question, like, if you had a magic wand, perhaps the question should just be, if there was more funding beyond sort of maintaining the service that it has now, what would you like to see? Can you name a couple of things that you wish we had here in Rhode Island, in our transit system that we don’t currently have?

Cedric Ye

I guess having a frequent transit network, where the definition of frequent is actually every 15 minutes, or better. So you don’t have to look at a schedule to get to most places in the urban core, which is included in the Transit Master Plan, more cross-town services, which is included in the Transit Master Plan.

Colleen Cronin

I have a feeling you’re gonna keep saying that…

Cedric Ye 

The R-Line has been, it is RIPTA’s ridership powerhouse, it’s a service that’s genuinely competitive with driving, and the master plan includes adding many more of those corridors. ridership is directly correlated to the quality of service you provide. In the few cases where RIPTA has increased service despite the chronic underfunding, they’ve been incredibly successful, like the 72 when they increased the frequency from every 30 minutes to 20 minutes, extended it to the hospital, made it run up to 11 p.m. its ridership right now is 125% of what its pre-Covid ridership was. RIPTA’s average is 80. RIPTA just realigned the 40 for better connections and added Sunday service, made it run on a clock face schedule so like you can memorize the schedule.

Colleen Cronin 

It’s sort of like how, if you have a car, you don’t really have to plan 100% when you’re going to go to the grocery store, or, you know, you don’t have to think so many steps ahead if you have an appointment. If the bus is more reliable, there’s a little less planning that has to go into it, and a little bit more freedom with your time.

Cedric Ye 

Yes, I mean, it’s the golden standard of public transit planning, frequency is freedom.

Colleen Cronin

Well, Cedric, that, I think, was a good place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and we’ll be staying tuned to see what happens.

Cedric Ye

Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all the reporting, the incredible reporting that you and ecoRI have been doing.