Blacksburg Transit Wins State Award After People Commit Radical Liberal Act of Riding Bus

BLACKSBURG, VA — Blacksburg Transit received Virginia’s inaugural Hill Spencer Ridership Award after carrying more than 4.7 million passenger trips during fiscal year 2025, a 26% increase from the previous year and the highest ridership total in the system’s history.

Apparently, if public transportation is useful, frequent and inexpensive enough, people will use it.

Economists are being notified.

The Virginia Transit Association created the Hill Spencer Ridership Award to recognize transit systems posting the strongest year-over-year ridership increases within several size categories. Blacksburg Transit became its first recipient in the category for systems carrying more than 2 million passengers annually.

BT also ranked as Virginia’s sixth-largest public transit provider and posted the fourth-largest proportional ridership increase among the commonwealth’s systems from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2025. Across Virginia, 40 public transit agencies collectively provided more than 144 million trips during the year, themselves representing a 14% increase.

This is particularly impressive considering Blacksburg is not Washington, Richmond or Northern Virginia.

It is a mountain college town where a substantial portion of the urban population occasionally disappears for Christmas.

A major factor in the increase was the August 2024 restructuring of service around new campus loops and Virginia Tech’s new transit hub. Blacksburg Transit spokesperson Susan Winfrey said the changes fundamentally revamped the system’s operations. BT also continues serving destinations beyond campus throughout Blacksburg and Christiansburg.

The system is currently fare-free for all riders, including its services in both Blacksburg and Christiansburg. No fare, pass or identification is required.

There are policy debates in which reasonable people can disagree about highly complicated trade-offs.

And then there is:

“Would you like to get on this bus?”

“Sure.”

“That’ll be zero dollars.”

“Hell yeah.”

Public transportation occupies a strange place in American politics because it is one of those government services whose usefulness becomes considerably easier to understand after somebody actually uses it.

A bus is neither socialism nor capitalism.

It is a large vehicle.

It goes places.

People get inside.

The philosophical sophistication arrives later.

BT’s success is especially relevant in a New River Valley where housing, student growth, traffic and regional development increasingly overlap. Virginia Tech places tens of thousands of students, employees and visitors inside a relatively small geographic area, while Blacksburg and Christiansburg continue adding housing and commercial development around them.

There are essentially two ways to accommodate all those people.

One is to give every individual their own two-ton metal box and gradually pave the entire valley.

The other is the bus.

Blacksburg has apparently been experimenting with the second idea.

Winfrey told Cardinal News that full buses are common, particularly at the beginning of semesters as Virginia Tech students settle into their schedules.

This is an unusual problem for public transit agencies to have.

Too many customers.

Traditionally, American transit discourse begins with somebody explaining that nobody rides public transportation, followed immediately by a proposal to reduce service until this becomes true.

Blacksburg has managed the opposite.

The ridership increase also provides a useful counterpoint to the New River Valley’s recurring argument about growth.

Much of the region’s economic development has necessarily focused on bringing people here: students to Virginia Tech and Radford University, researchers, businesses, tourists, technology workers and increasingly residents priced outward from larger metropolitan areas.

But making a region attractive involves more than constructing apartments and hoping the restaurants appear.

People need to move through it.

A functioning community requires boring things.

Sidewalks.

Sewers.

Buses.

Parks.

Libraries.

Things everybody finds insufficiently sexy until they disappear.

Snide Studios can attempt to make the New River Valley more culturally interesting. Local venues, artists, nightlife, media and weird little creative enterprises can provide reasons for students and younger professionals to imagine remaining here after graduation.

But nobody stays somewhere because the local comedy is excellent if they cannot afford a house, reach work or safely cross the goddamn road.

Culture and infrastructure are not competing projects.

They are the things that transform development into a place.

Blacksburg Transit’s numbers offer unusually tangible evidence of what happens when public infrastructure becomes sufficiently convenient to enter ordinary life.

More than 4.7 million trips occurred in one fiscal year.

Those were not 4.7 million ideological statements.

They were people going somewhere.

The government provided a bus.

The people got on it.

For once, everybody appears to have understood the assignment.