Thanks to Knoxville Area Transit and Knoxville’s penchant for bad air quality, many in the city have come to associate orange-level air quality days with free KAT bus rides.
But those days are over.
Cindy McGinnis, KAT general manager, said the program has been discontinued due to Knoxville having 13 days this summer with orange-level air quality, including a time span from July 3 through July 8 where every day had orange-level air quality.
All these days with bad air quality drained the funds that KAT received from Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality in a federal grant the state of Tennessee applied for.
As a result, the program was discontinued after the orange-level alert day on July 8, and McGinnis said KAT will not be seeking those funds to continue the program in the future.
She said the Air Quality Action Days were not serving either purpose they were designed for — to encourage people to keep their cars at home, while also attracting new riders to KAT buses.
“We were not attracting new commuters,” McGinnis said. “Just our current passengers were riding a lot more (on Air Quality Action Days.)”
In June, she said KAT averaged 7,000 riders on a weekday, while Air Quality Action Days would attract about 10,000. Then the very next day, if it was not a bad air day, the ridership would be back to about 7,000.
“That proves to us right there,” she said. “We were not keeping cars off the road. We were just having more of our current riders making more trips, which was good, but the program wasn’t doing what it was intended to do.”
These circumstances brought about several disadvantages for KAT, she said.
With more riders, there were more stops, so doors to the vehicle were constantly opening, making it impossible to keep the bus cool.
Plus regular passengers, who buy seven- or 30-day passes were complaining because they didn’t get free days like those who were not regular passengers.
Funding left in droves, too, especially when air-quality days fell on weekdays, as loads more passengers would hop on. This was because KAT averaged hundreds of passengers on weekends, while ridership would be in the thousands on weekdays.
And the last major disadvantage was, again, that no new customers were latching onto KAT. McGinnis blamed the fact that KAT could not predict air quality days.
KAT would hear about air-quality days at about 4 p.m. the day before one would take place, making it more difficult to advertise the free rides. It basically left it up to pedestrians downtown just happening to see the bus’ electronic ticker say “free” as they rode past.
“We wouldn’t know from day to day when it would occur, so we couldn’t plan and say, ‘the funding is going to run out in mid-July,’” she said. “We wouldn’t know because we wouldn’t know when the Air Quality Action Days would occur.”
Also, even if they did know that it was an air-quality day, would riders want to make the effort on those days?
“These air-quality alert days tend to be very hot days,” she said. “... Those aren’t the times you want to try something new, on the hottest days of the year.”
McGinnis said, perhaps in the future, KAT could brainstorm to come up with a better solution to get people to try mass transit on bad air days.

Inconsistent air-quality summers
National Weather Service meteorologist David Hotz said orange-level air quality days meant people that are sensitive to air quality — such as perhaps the elderly or the very young — may experience some breathing problems.
“Pretty much all the air quality alerts that we’ve had so far this year generally have been due to ground-level ozone concentrations,” Hotz said.
During certain conditions, like, say, a ridge of high pressure over the Southern Appalachians, ozone-level build-up occurs and is lowered down to the ground from high in the atmosphere. This high level of ozone makes the air quality poor.
According to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation website, orange-level alert days usually occur when there’s temperatures in the 80s and 90s with light to moderate winds, partly cloudy to mostly sunny skies and chances of rain or afternoon thunderstorms.
Hotz said people should stay indoors for long durations during bad air quality days if they experience problems breathing.
“Keep your activity level down as much as possible if you have to go outside,” he said.
Loren Marz, NWS meteorologist with a focus in air quality, said he would guess an average air-quality summer would be about five or six bad air quality days.
But this certainly did not happen this year. As of press time, Knoxville has experienced 13 air-quality alert days, the most recent of which being July 14.
Marz said there were about 13 days that would have had orange-level alerts in summer 2008, as well.
But summer 2009 was more tame. Marz said there were only six alert days, with the last one being August 8. Only two of the six days occurred after June 26.
“Air quality is slowly getting better here,” Marz said. “Emissions are going down slowly, so I don’t know if we can really consider what would be an average year.”
He said that we can expect even more air-quality days before summer 2010 ends, due to a hot pattern the city is about to get back into.
“The air quality will get worse than it has been the last few days,” he said.