Nana turns 90 this year. Born and raised in Hartford, she graduated from Hartford Public High School and – besides a brief stint away while my grandfather served in the Air Force – moved back to build a home here in the 1960s. That home has seen many iterations over the decades, shaped by whate ver time and money allowed. Nearly 60 years later, it’s still a work in progress. The best evidence: a staircase that has been “temporarily” constructed for as long as anyone can remember. Transit networks aren’t so different. You can’t skip steps just because you know what the finished product should look like. Sequence isn’t a detail – it’s everything. And like my grandparents’ home, a transit network will always require consistent attention and thoughtful upkeep. Each step enables the next. Any contractor worth their salt will tell you: skipping steps doesn’t get you closer to the end. It just leaves you with an unusable staircase. Enter House Bill 5464. The bill would allow the Connecticut Department of Transportation to purchase diesel or hybrid buses once the prohibition in Public Act 22-25 takes effect — a ban originally passed to improve air quality. CTDOT is seeking flexibility, citing delays in electric bus manufacturing. Opponents will frame this as a retreat from climate goals. It isn’t. But it also cannot become an excuse to continue business as usual. This should be treated as a necessary, temporary step — one that gets us closer to the transit network Connecticut actually deserves. Right now, CTDOT runs insufficient service. People don’t have a realistic alternative to driving. That absence of transit does more damage to air quality than any diesel engine powering a temporary bus solution. The electric bus mandate makes a subtle but serious mistake: it borrows the logic of the personal EV movement and applies it somewhere that logic doesn’t fit. Electrifying a personal vehicle is a straightforward swap – same trip, same driver, cleaner engine. But a bus isn’t a car. An effective bus is one that people actually ride. Of course we should want electric buses. The benefits are real: smoother rides, lower emissions, reduced noise, lower maintenance costs. But any bus is better than no bus. A frequent, reliable diesel bus does more for air quality than an electric bus that comes every 40 minutes. As transit planner Jarrett Walker put it plainly on the Volts podcast: fewer than five people need to be on a diesel bus – instead of driving – for it to be better for the environment than an electric car. The goal shouldn’t be an electric bus for every diesel bus. It should be a network so frequent and reliable that people actually use it. This isn’t for lack of study. Hartford’s Farmington Avenue corridor alone has been examined repeatedly: the Comprehensive Transit Service Analysis (2017), the Transit Priority Corridors Study (2022), a Bus Stop Infrastructure Audit, and a plan called “A New Farmington Avenue” dating back to 2000. Every one of them recommended consolidating bus stops to improve speed and reliability. The stops are largely unchanged. When I worked at CTtransit over a decade ago, Transit Signal Priority (TSP) – a system that holds a green light a few extra seconds so a full bus can clear an intersection – was already a major topic of discussion. It still hasn’t been implemented systemwide, let alone on every major route. We’ve redrawn the plans for the staircase over and over. What’s missing is the willingness to build it. If legislators are serious about air quality, they should pass HB 5464 – not as a concession, but as a chance to finally do the work that’s been deferred for decades. Pass the bill, then follow through: consolidate stops on Farmington Avenue and other major corridors, implement TSP where it matters most, and deliver service frequent enough that people actually choose transit over driving — every 10 to 15 minutes on major routes. The standard that peer cities have already met. Electric buses may well be the finished staircase – quiet, clean, the version of transit Connecticut deserves. But a gleaming electric bus on a route that comes every 40 minutes doesn’t clean the air. It doesn’t get anyone out of their car. And it doesn’t build the Hartford my grandmother remembers. The work is never finished. But we know what the next step is. It’s time to build it. Leah Beckett lives in Hartford. ...read more read less