Zen’Yari Winters’ job, at a pet shop in East Memphis, Tennessee, should be a 20-minute trip from her house. She leaves herself three hours to get there. “The bus is always, always late,” she said – if it shows up at all.

It’s not just her work commute that’s affected by the time-consuming guessing game that is riding with the Memphis Area Transit Authority (Mata). The only full-service grocer in the Chelsea-Hollywood area where she lives closed in 2025. To shop for food in person, she could take two buses for a 13-mile (20km) trip to Walmart. But she risks waiting at bus stops for hours with perishables – or shelling out about $24 for an Uber back.

So instead, every two weeks, she buys at least $35 worth of groceries online to avoid a $6.99 fee for a smaller order and pays a $7 monthly delivery charge not covered by her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits. “That’s literally my only option,” she said.

Winters is just one of 16 million Americans without cars and one of almost 25 million living in a “transit desert” where the public transportation supply is lower than demand. For them, accessing healthy, affordable food is both an inconvenience and an extravagance. Some people report paying neighbors $60 to drive them to the supermarket, according to Urban Institute research. A University of New Hampshire study found that boosting transit access, by adding one bus per 10,000 city residents, could modestly reduce household food insecurity.

But cities such as Memphis; Providence, Rhode Island; and Duluth, Minnesota, have gone in the opposite direction and cut service. These actions were driven by what Art Guzzetti, the vice-president of policy, mobility, technical services and innovation at advocacy group American Public Transportation Association, calls a “transit fiscal cliff” affecting some cities as $70bn in Biden-era funds to prop up Covid-beleaguered transit systems runs out. This is all while food insecurity rises across the US amid job losses and threats to cut Snap food aid.

That cliff has forced some transit agencies to economize by rerouting buses and cutting back on their frequency. They’re also getting rid of stops, which Sierra Arnold, a microeconomist at Xavier University in Cincinnati, found led to fewer purchases of healthier foods. “When stops leave a neighborhood, your options immediately change and people look at their next best choice, which is something local,” such as a bodega, “as opposed to traveling even farther to access [cheaper] nutritious food,” Arnold said.

In Memphis, Mata’s post-Covid attempts to improve its ridership and finances led to reduced service on many routes, and repairs for its aging bus fleet languished amid a leadership spending scandal. Kelsey Huse, a local activist and urban planning student who has helped publicize Winters’ plight, said the sentiment, “especially around upper-income and white people, is that the bus system is just a [corrupt] failure that’s never going to improve. They don’t want to ride the bus, and people like Zen’Yari are just forgotten about.”

Similar to Memphis, Rhode Island’s state transit authority cut service on 45 of its 63 routes in September 2025, to save money on low-ridership lines. Sherman Pines, a Newport resident, said this happened on top of a Covid-era budget-saving measure that reduced service in his town during the non-touristy, non-summer months, making bus service unreliable. A nearby supermarket allows residents to walk groceries home in store carts. But Pines called the store “horrible, pricey, small” – anyone who wants to travel farther afield contends with long waits for a city bus and at least one transfer. An added hazard: too few bus shelters. “That’s just hard on an elderly person to stand there for 30 minutes or 45 minutes, it’s raining, it’s snowing,” Pines said.

The epidemiologist Ric Bayly documented these sorts of experiences in a 2025 Tufts University-led study on Rhode Island’s bus-food connection. He found that even with double the time to travel to and from a grocery store, less than half of residents had healthy food access via bus as opposed to a car, leaving him to conclude that “public transit is just a terrible way to get food”, he said. “It’s just so difficult to deal with the weather, the weight, the carrying, the trouble you have getting on a bus with a cart of food, [because] the transit authority in Rhode Island allows bus drivers to forbid entry with a food cart.”

Finding solutions: taxi vouchers and electric scooters

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.

Some communities have sought to solve their transit and food problems with mobile grocery stores that let people shop in their neighborhoods, since many people prefer to pick their own groceries. Guzzetti, from American Public Transportation Association, sees promise in having city planners move away from prioritizing cars in new developments. When deciding where to build, “make transit access a foremost, high-level consideration in location decisions”, he said.

For residents of Memphis, who are stuck with the built environment they already have, a new potential solution is emerging. A privately funded non-profit called MyCityRides is teaching residents how to drive gas-powered scooters to counteract the reality that, as Huse said, “the bus is not perfect and cars are expensive”.

Winters completed a day of scooter school and is practicing her driving. If she passes her motorcycle test, MyCityRides will sell her a scooter for $150 a month paid out over three years. “Riding a scooter would be so much cheaper and easier than riding the bus and getting stuck at the bus stop for hours,” she said. “I am hoping that soon I will be able to get one.”