Quick Take
The exciting, new transportation services planned by Santa Cruz Metro are not happening, at least not yet, writes Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin. The plans included 15-minute service time on major routes, bus-priority traffic signals and more. But the poor state of the current fleet makes the timeline impossible until at least summer, when 53 hydrogen-fueled buses Metro purchased in September 2023 are due to arrive. That is reduced from the planned 57, due to costs. Metro apologized for the delay at a December meeting of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission meeting, but Rotkin thinks the board, of which he is a member, should have seen this problem coming and asked better questions.
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Last January, I wrote with great excitement about the dramatic improvements coming to the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District and its service. The Metro board had approved plans that would have poised our transit system to become among the best for small communities in the United States.
We were planning on 15-minute service on major routes and simpler, more direct service to major destinations like schools, jobs and medical facilities. The planned and approved changes were supposed to be augmented by bus-priority traffic signals on Soquel Avenue throughout the county, a program for free adult fares and the development of a bus-on-shoulder lane as part of the current construction on Highway 1.
All of these dreams and proposed changes came crashing down in mid-December, when Metro management realized the district did not have a sufficient number of buses in good repair to deliver this expanded service. As they were preparing to publish the new headways schedule for the winter bid to begin in January, which included all of the new changes, management realized that there simply were not enough working buses in the system to deliver the service promised.
With very little notice to the public, management decided to simply follow the fall service bid already in place. With a few minor changes, the promised improvements will now have to be postponed until Metro has sufficient buses to deliver the new level of service.
This is a huge inconvenience to the drivers who had planned their lives around the new routes they had bid, and an even bigger inconvenience and disappointment to the public. We had every reason to expect the new service.
About 10 people came to the Metro board meeting on Dec. 20 to share their concern about the lack of transparency provided by Metro about the problems the district was and is facing about the promised increases in service level. The commitment of dedicated bus riders like those who testified at our meeting is a big part of what it takes to have a successful transit system in our community.
There are several reasons for the shortage of buses, but the primary issue is the age and poor state of repair of Metro’s fleet. Some of our buses now have over 1 million miles of service and are, not surprisingly, subject to breakdowns. Supply chain breakdowns have made it more difficult to get the parts necessary for repairs and, in many cases, Metro mechanics have been forced to actually manufacture replacement parts or, in other cases, simply park buses that cannot be repaired. The district also faces a shortage of trained mechanics.
The bus shortage problem will be addressed when the 53 hydrogen-fueled buses that Metro purchased in 2023 finally arrive in Santa Cruz in early summer. By that time, the district should have also constructed the fueling facilities necessary to service these new buses.
But, in the meantime, the promised new service will simply not be available to the public.
Following the Dec. 20 meeting, where management explained this situation, Metro CEO Corey Aldridge issued a public apology (posted online under “Metro’s winter schedule update”) and to Metro drivers for not having realized how dire the bus shortage problem was for the district. And, more importantly, the apology explained that the management should have been more transparent about the decision to not issue the new bid for January service.
Aldridge also explained to the board and the public that he now has put procedures in place so that something like this will not happen again in the future. It is one thing to face a shortage of buses for reasons that are largely beyond the control of the Metro Transit District. It is something else to not see this problem coming and, even worse, to not be transparent with the public about the problem once it was discovered.
So, in addition to the apology offered by Metro management for these problems, I need to add my own. As a member of the Metro board, I and my fellow board members should have seen this problem coming and been at least a little less enthusiastic about premature promises about improvements in the public transit service.
I still am excited about what the new service levels will offer our community when we are actually able to implement them. They have far-reaching implications for how we get around our community, the amount of affordable housing we can provide to our residents, and the positive contribution we can make to addressing climate change threats.
But we will have to wait a bit longer before they can become a reality.