Shop & Ride
Knoxville Transit Authority
David M. White, Director of Marketing
1135 Magnolia Ave.
Knoxville, Tenn. 37917
(615) 546-3752

Like so many of the best and most easily replicable model programs to combat hunger and poverty, this one seems so simple that it's hard to understand why no one thought of it before.

It works like this: Anyone who rides the Knoxville Transit Authority's K-Trans buses at any time may ask the driver for a "Shop & Ride" coupon. This coupon, stamped with a purchase of $10 or more at any of the region's Kroger, Food City or Cox & Wright groceries or Watson's department store, is valid for a free bus ride home.

It's just as simple as that, a small (up to $1.20) but significant boost that makes a difference to a poor person who has to rely on public transportation and who has to travel outside her inner-city neighborhood to get away from small, poorly stocked and overpriced local markets to reach the large suburban supermarkets.

Although the transit authority presumes that most people who use the program are poor, the coupons are available to all, no questions asked, "even if they make $100,000 a year," David White said. Further, no one minds if an individual picks up a coupon and passes it along to a friend.

Costs of the program are minimal. The transit authority prints the blue-and-orange coupons, collects used ones, and turns them over to the store management, which reimburses their full value, which rose to 2,286 bus rides in March 1993.

The grocery chains apparently consider the money well spent to get shoppers into their store, White said; the transit authority gains riders, and the benefits to the people who use the coupons are obvious. "It's a win-win-win situation," he said.

In theory at least, Shop & Ride has been on the books since before anyone now involved with the program can recall. It may have originated as a device to get people into the downtown department stores during the early 1970s, when the rise of suburban malls was sucking the life blood out of Knoxville's downtown.

But by 1990, only Watson's was participating, and only a few riders per month were taking advantage.

That all changed when several happy coincidences resurrected the program in its new form, with the focus primarily on groceries: First, poor people and local advocates held a demonstration and began calling for strategies to improve access to food for inner-city residents. In the informal discussions that followed among city officials, advocates, the Knoxville Food Policy Council and the transit authority, Kroger's Regional Manager Hunter McWilliams agreed to get the chain's nine Knoxville stores involved, and the program took off.

During the first full month of participation, just 25 Kroger shoppers got free rides. But within six months, publicized by advertising on buses, in stores and on radio and television, the number of Shop & Ride passengers rose to 1,100; and a total of 1,640 Kroger shoppers got free rides in March 1993.

The program couldn't have started without cooperation among a range of corporate interests, advocates and the transit authority, which also re-evaluated its route structure to ensure that inner-city areas and supermarkets were linked with reasonably direct and frequent service.

K-Trans has received some local publicity, and its officials have won awards from the American Public Transit Association for creative marketing. But an idea this simple and this effective deserves more exposure. There's no reason that every American city with a bus company and access-to-food problems in the inner city couldn't be doing the same.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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