Northside resident Michael Dunning is one of the many Kalamazoo residents who have had difficulties navigating the city's construction zones this summer.
“It's just too hectic," Dunning said as he sat in his car outside the Park Street Market grocery in the Northside neighborhood Thursday morning. "Sometimes you just want to just stay in, keep from, you know, going out into this busy traffic and trying to get around through Kalamazoo.”
Widespread road work, utility work and construction has made navigation a hassle. Some businesses on closed streets say they're struggling.
This led the city to launch a shuttle in partnership with Metro Transit in the Northside neighborhood, in an effort to get shoppers to their destinations.
Now the city is replacing the shuttle after no one used it in two weeks of operation.
A trip with no one
I took a trip of my own Thursday on the road-work-dodging shuttle, expecting to talk with riders about their experiences.
I started my trip at Mount Zion Baptist Church. The bus arrived at 11 a.m., but besides myself, no one else boarded the shuttle.
This theme continued with the bus's other two stops: Galilee Baptist Church and First United Baptist Church.
The bus would stop, wait for a bit, and no one would get on, and according to Metro Transit Executive Director Sean McBride, this is nothing new.
Since the shuttle started on July 11, it had not seen a single passenger.
While McBride didn't have a definitive answer as to why no one used the service, he did have a theory.
"Starting a new service is oftentimes hard when people have all their patterns that they work with," he said.
"Too little, too late"
The shuttle continued to its destination: the Park Street Market grocery store and adjacent businesses.
One of these businesses is The Victorian Bakery, co-owned by Maria Brennan.
Brennan said the road closures have been a hardship for the bakery.
“I don't know if we can do another road closure on a personal level, and I think that the city has not taken this into consideration the amount of stress that it's put us through," she told me in a phone call.
Brennan said that the shuttle service came too late for businesses. She added the city should have had a better strategy when it came to the construction.
“We do need the roads improved, there's no question about that. It just seems that logistically, it was very poorly planned.”
As for the shuttle, Sean McBride with Metro Transit said it has been replaced with a free on-demand transit service as of Monday, July 29.
The city and Metro launched on-demand trips to businesses in the South Westnedge construction zone last week, and will expand to include the Park Street businesses.
McBride believed the switch would be successful, with the on-demand nature of the service providing more flexibility for users.
"When you're dealing with groceries or heavier bulk or bulkier items, it's more convenient to have more of a personalized service," he said.
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
