RIPTA Service Cuts Would Have Profound Effect on this Washington County Resident
August 18, 2025
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PROVIDENCE — Samantha Maar spent a long August day on the Rhode Island College campus figuring out whether she should take out loans to attend class this fall.
Maar, 33, finished her undergraduate degree at RIC this past spring and hopes to embark on a master’s degree in social work at the college this year. But her dream of pursuing a graduate degree feels precarious right now. Maar, who doesn’t own a car, will likely defer school if the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority moves forward with planned cuts to its service.
Maar, who lives in Washington County, relies on the 69 and 65X bus routes, which would be eliminated under a plan RIPTA announced in late July. She also uses the 66 route, which would see reduced frequency under the plan. The agency said it would make cuts in service to most of its lines, including those with the lowest ridership, because it is facing a $10 million budget deficit.
She can’t buy a car right now (“It’s not in my means at the current moment; I’m a grad student,” she said), and Wickford Junction is too far from her home to make Amtrak or the commuter rail a feasible option. Maar said she’s been looking into a van pool or finding someone to carpool with, but nothing is panning out so far.
“If these cuts go through,” she said, “I won’t be able to go to school in the fall, and I’ll have to withdraw from it, which would be catastrophic to me.”
She said she’s holding off taking out the loans she needs for the coming semester, fearful that getting to classes will be impossible and accruing all that debt will have been for nothing.
Maar knows the current transit system isn’t perfect. When she attended RIPTA’s Aug. 7 special board meeting to advocate against the service cuts, it took her three hours to get to the authority’s headquarters in Providence from her home.
“The cuts that are proposed haven’t gone into effect yet, and it could take three hours to go 40 minutes in distance,” she said.
But RIPTA currently gets people where they need to go, she said, calling its service a lifeline.
As a young queer person living outside Rhode Island’s urban core, Maar said she often organizes outings for other people using the bus. “You don’t have to go up to Providence to find it. You can find it down here, you know,” she said.
Gov. Dan McKee is “cutting people away from their community,” Maar said, a situation that will have profound social, economic, and environmental impacts on state residents.
Maar said the cuts will hamper the state’s ability to achieve its climate goals of reducing emissions outlined in the Act on Climate law.
“We kind of have to try and figure out today and tomorrow right now. But yeah, it’s still there,” she said of the environmental impact, “and it’s not going anywhere. It’s sad.”
Although it has been difficult to speaking publicly about her story, Maar said she feels inclined to share if it can move the needle on the issue.
“There’s just so many different people affected,” she said. “There’s so many people who can’t even speak about it, which is really what starts the tears.”
At the Aug. 7 RIPTA board meeting, at which a decision on the cuts was postponed, Maar got choked up talking about a bus driver she knows whose route is on the chopping block. Sitting in a Providence bakery near RIC’s campus more recently, she held back tears several times while speaking about what the cuts will mean for her and people she knows.
To channel her stress and frustration, she’s been going to as many hearings as she can, making phone calls, writing letters, and making it easier for friends to do the same by writing scripts and helping them craft personalized testimony.
“It baffles me … that the people making decisions aren’t there in the room, hearing these people,” said Maar, “and that’s what really bothers me.”
As to what Maar will do if the cuts go through and she has to defer school, she isn’t sure yet.
“I think I’d have to go look for a remote job or possibly move to a state that has a public transit system, and kind of go from there,” she said. “But this is where my family is, where my community is.”
She would like to look forward to getting her master’s degree, but when asked specifically what she’s excited about in the coming school year, Maar couldn’t answer.
“I’ve kind of been … this is awful,” she said, and then paused. “I’ve been trying not to think about it too much with everything going on, so I don’t want to get overly excited for it to get kind of rug pulled.”
To make up the $10 million needed to fill in the agency’s deficit in the coming fiscal year, changes to service must be implemented by Oct. 1.
Every day McKee demonstrtates his cluelessness.
it is not too late to avert the service cuts, but it is not up to the RIPTA Board, it is up to the Governor who has already indicated he has the power to reallocate funds if he wants to. Please call his office, 401 222-2080 if you would like to help and ask him to fully fund our bus system
I don’t understand why it was necessary to add, “as a young queer person”. For instance, would the author say “as a young heterosexual person” under different circumstances?
Hello Karen,
I am right there with you. Their sexually orientation is irrelevant to their need for transportation.
Your lack of understanding of queer issues in RI is showing, Karen. Maybe if you took a moment off of your heterosexual soapbox you would understand. These cuts have a disparate impact on many communities in the State. It is comments like this that hurt queer communities. Please let me know if you would like some reading materials to help you understand the community.
From,
A heterosexual who understands inclusion
Condescending and patronizing – a twofer! What makes you think I’m heterosexual?
Karen, I am glad you are so laser-focused on that line. Someone had to miss the entire point of the article, I’m glad it had to be you
When this was going on, RIPTA was running a social media ad of people who rely on transportion to get to/from work. I went and checked and sure enough, all those people would have been affected by this budget shortfall and otherwise would have lost their means of income as the bus is their only way to work. It was extremely tone deaf.
On the subject of the article, I am in my last year at CCRI so I relate to this Maar on this sadly, and I also was thinking I was going to have to postpone graduation to put money towards a car instead (all during a time when major changes are being made to Pell grant) because of McKee and the budget shortfall. I cannot afford a car now since I am juggling school full time and working enough to pay the bills. I was hoping after graduating and securing a job in my field (rad tech) that pays more than minimum wage, I would finally be able to do so. But because of McKee’s carelessness, it made me experience so much uncertainty and made me think all the work I had put in was down the drain. I will never forgive that.
Truly hope he is voted out of office for this. It affects a lot of Rhode Islanders. Just shows how careless they all are.
My first response when I read this article was (and continues to be) how can I help. I also took busses to college when I wasn’t riding my bike for the nine miles between home and school. It is clear from the rest of the article why you need public transportation and I’m sure you are not alone. I think there was no need to bring up those particular aspects of your personal life. It has no bearing on your need to keep the busses running, and IMO it is a distraction that hurts your cause. I remember a line from ‘Guess who’s coming for dinner?’, “You think of yourself as a black man, I just think of myself as a man”.