Adapted for Da VIP Academy — two short letters to a city council

LETTER A: Our neighborhood needs the late bus restored. When the 74 stopped running after 10 p.m., third-shift workers lost their only ride. Since the cut, ridership on the daytime 74 has dropped 18 percent, because a bus you cannot count on at night is a bus you stop trusting during the day. Restoring the route costs $340,000 a year — less than one percent of the transit budget.

LETTER B: The late bus should stay canceled. Ridership after 10 p.m. averaged eleven passengers per run. Everyone I know drives. The money would be better spent repaving Delmar, which every driver in the city uses daily. We cannot keep funding services that only a handful of people need.

LETTER A argues that daytime ridership fell 18 percent because of the night cut. This reasoning depends on the assumption that

• A.riders judge a route's reliability as a whole, not by time of day
• B.the transit budget is too small
• C.third-shift workers are the majority of riders
• D.repaving Delmar is unnecessary