Lebanon -- Some days, if the weather holds and she doesn't feel too much pain, Lynne Anderson thinks she could manage the half-mile walk from her home to the hospital.

Anderson admits it's a risk, though, because she never knows. Many mornings it hurts to just walk down the stairs.

Since her first child, Kathy, was born 43 years ago, Anderson has used Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital. In 1988, when she suffered massive ligament and muscle damage when a car struck her -- twice -- and again this past fall after doctors told her she had a blood clot, Anderson has remained loyal to the Lebanon hospital.

As long as Anderson can remember, though, she's had one problem. She doesn't drive, and her partner of 20 years, Francis LeBrun, uses their only car from 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. for work each day.

If only, Anderson says, a bus could take her from home to the hospital, it would change her life.

Buses don't deliver patients to Alice Peck Day's front doors because an underpass, about a quarter mile from the entrance, sits to low for them to use, but Anderson and more than 200 other area residents who attended a meeting on the issue yesterday are campaigning for a change.

Volunteers for United Valley Interfaith Project, which includes 13 faith- and community-based member groups, organized yesterday's event at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lebanon, attracting local, state and hospital officials as well as Alice Peck Day employees, patients affected by the problem and residents from the Harvest Hill retirement community, located behind the hospital.

Plainfield resident Rod Wendt, a retired marketing consultant and the project's president, told the crowd New Hampshire's funding for public transit was “pretty dismal and worst of all, erratic. We are about the worst in the country.”

In fact, the Granite State, Wendt said, ranks as the fifth lowest contributor in the United States, with projections showing that New Hampshire will supply about 3 cents per person in 2010.

Community officials have devised a number of possible solutions, from demolishing the underpass to enlarging the opening to cutting pedestrian walkways on each side of the potentially dangerous roadway.

The state has told Wendt the underpass, which once supported a rail line, can't be removed in case a light rail system someday passes through Lebanon. Other fixes, Wendt said, are estimated to cost between $50,000 and $200,000.

“What we believe is needed is for all of us to work together to crack the funding nut in Concord,” Wendt told the crowd. “If we don't get started, we will certainly never get it solved.”

Alice Peck Day, he said, is the only hospital in the region without bus service to its front door, adding that 56 percent of its patients and 50 percent of its employees live in towns served by Advance Transit.

The transportation conundrum has forced Anderson to cancel several appointments, especially now that two friends who used to drive her have moved away. Sometimes, LeBrun drops her off on his way to work in the morning and can't pick her up until he gets off, leaving her to wait for more than eight hours at the hospital.

“If the appointment is really important, he has to take off from work,” she told the crowd. “Not a good idea.”

Van Chestnut of Advance Transit promised to work with community leaders but also noted the Upper Valley, in many ways, has superior public transportation to many cities. Manchester, he said, may lose all of its fixed-route transit services in an upcoming budget cycle.

State Sen. Matthew Houde, a Democrat from Plainfield, also joined six state representatives in a commitment to address the overpass issue. Lebanon Democrat Laurie Harding said she would find out if the project is eligible for federal stimulus funding.

“No one entity can solve this problem,” said Lebanon City Councilor Nicole Cormen, who was joined by councilors Karen Liot Hill and George Sykes at the meeting. “I'm just blown away that on a gorgeous day after the big rain we had that this room is filled.”

The council, Sykes added, would discuss the problem at its meeting tomorrow.

Besides Anderson, other patients, employees and Harvest Hill residents told similar stories of the troubles they've endured because of the underpass and the lack of public transit to the hospital.

Because of rising cab fares, Lebanon resident Scott Yuille, an Alice Peck Day patient, takes a bus part of the way and walks the rest, including under the overpass, to his appointments.

“I have found,” he said, “that walking in the middle of the road bed gives drivers the chance at least to see me before they hit me.”

John Woodrow Cox can be reached at 603-727-3305 or jcox@vnews.com.