2 Buses, 3 Hours, 13 Miles - How Americans In "Transit Deserts" Get Groceries Without Cars

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Deborah L Wray, a 70-year-old Providence resident, had her cart rejected from the bus only once. Until recently, Wray could catch the 92 bus every half an hour across the street from home and ride it to Price Rite, the closest supermarket to home. These days, the bus runs every two hours. “You just sit there and wait because if you’re not standing right at that bus stop [when it comes], you’re out of luck” that a driver will pull over, she said. Price Rite also doesn’t accept the Medicare UCard she uses to buy the healthy foods she needs to eat as someone with diabetes. For that, she takes a different bus to Stop & Shop; she prefers to stretch her Snap benefits by hitting the sales at Market Basket, which is serviced by yet another bus. Some evenings, she eats peanut butter and other shelf-stable items from a pantry box delivered to her building. That’s a short-term fix for “when you ain’t got nothing, so us elderly don’t have to eat dog food”, she said.

A survey of 100 Duluth residents uncovered similar transportation-related hassles. Covid-reduced bus routes, long wait times, too little space for shopping carts, and bad weather were the primary barriers residents identified in purchasing healthy, affordable foods. The city recently set up a transportation commission in an attempt to improve. But changes are “sometimes beneficial, and other times they’re not, and we heard many comments that the revamps have actually made things worse”, said Stephany Medina, a food justice policy developer who worked on the survey. Respondents pointed out that a changed bus stop now required crossing a major highway to reach a supermarket.

The city of Somerville, a city outside Boston that had a food insecurity rate of 35% in 2025, exemplifies the difficulty in connecting under-resourced communities to the foods they prefer to eat. Residents might use buses to reach food pantries. But “the biggest thing we hear is that people would like to be able to get to places that are outside of Somerville, and they’re hard to get to without a car”, said Alissa Ebel, the city’s healthy communities coordinator. Those places include discount supermarket Aldi; wholesale clubs; and the Super 88 Asian market in Malden, which has a popular fish counter.

During and after the Covid pandemic, Somerville tested a program called Taxi to Health that gave out vouchers for taxi rides to grocers including Super 88. Vouchers are one form of demand-responsive transit (DRT), a flexible and more cost-efficient alternative to fixed-route bus systems. Another model, called microtransit, launches fleets of smaller vehicles such as vans to connect residents to supermarkets, sometimes on a sliding scale based on income. Students of Kathleen Hoke, a public health law professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law, developed one such system for Duluth residents in tandem with Medina’s survey.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/03/bus-public-transport-cuts-groceries-snap