Cap Metro Wants Its Pre-Pandemic Groove Back

Michael Hill takes the bus to work every morning. Well, he actually takes a few buses. He boards the 20, then transfers to the 300 and finally takes the 10 to get him to work. In total, his daily commute from Southeast to Southwest Austin takes about an hour and 15 minutes. Hill, who doesn’t own a car, said he largely enjoys the bus service, but noted that it’s important to plan for delays to ensure he arrives at work on time. “I have to get up early … because of the bus transportation,” he said.

Hill’s path to work highlights a number of issues facing Capital Metro, including reliability and finding ways to streamline public transit routes. The pandemic has made improving experiences like Hill’s a challenge, and in Cap Metro’s world a lot has happened in the two-plus years since March 2020. The public transit agency needed to consider the COVID safety of its passengers, which in part meant cutting back on route frequency. Austin voters approved Project Connect, a $7.1 billion (now estimated to cost over $10 billion) package to overhaul the city’s public transit offering by adding light rail lines and MetroRapid routes. Cap Metro also approved a transit police force, $550 million in funding for electric buses, and raises for mechanics and drivers amid a labor shortage. With goals to quadruple ridership in a little over a decade, but persistent problems for riders, the Chronicle set out to understand current ridership’s perception of Cap Metro service.

Another big change for Cap Metro: Its president and CEO Randy Clarke left to take over the Metro system in Washington, D.C., in the spring. Interim president and CEO Dottie Watkins, who began at Cap Metro as a bus operator in 1994, has been at the helm since Clarke’s departure. She noted that on-time metrics for buses have largely stayed consistent with pre-pandemic performance and that the public transit agency is hitting its goal of 83%.

However, lost time, the other key reliability metric, has been falling short of its goal. Lost time measures how many scheduled minutes did not operate. For example, if a bus doesn’t run at all due to a mechanical issue, Cap Metro counts that as lost time and does not count that toward its on-time metric. While lost time has improved in recent months, it sat just under 3% in August compared to the agency’s goal of under 1%.

“If that happens once, you have one of those days, your regular riders are going to be like, ‘I don’t know what was going on the other day. That was weird.’ But if that happens twice a week, then they start to expect it to happen twice a week. And over the last 18 months, it’s happened way more frequently than before the pandemic,” Watkins said of buses missing scheduled times. She added that delays earlier in the pandemic were related to staffing shortages, but Cap Metro now has enough operators and mechanics. The high lost time rate is increasingly a result of supply chain issues.

According to the Austin Strategic Mobil­ity Plan, only 4% of Austinites rely on public transit to get around, but the city aims to grow that number to 16% by 2039. Getting public transit advancements right in the 2020s will play a key role in the city’s ability to reach that number. As Cap Metro returns some of its services to pre-pandemic levels, it faces a decade that figures to be an unrelenting sprint to accomplish the goals set out in Project Connect.

Missing Class

UT students hoping to avoid the high cost of rent in West Campus often look to the East Riverside area for a cheaper option. To get to and from campus, some students drive, but many rely on the shuttle buses that run from outside Darrell K. Royal Stadium to the Southeast Austin neighborhood. The most common route for students is the 670, but the 671 and 672 also connect campus and Southeast Austin.

However, as Cap Metro continued to battle a labor shortage last school year, UT staff and students faced increasingly inconsistent service. Edgar Prado, a fourth-year student, nearly missed an exam because of a canceled bus last school year. Thankfully, a friend was able to drive him to campus in time. Determined not to repeat the experience, he began getting to the 670 bus stop an hour early just to play it safe. “Last year, it was pretty spotty,” Prado said. But things are looking a bit better this semester; Prado said service has “been pretty consistent.”

Jeanny Sánchez Gómez, also a UT student, moved to the East Riverside area about two years ago and uses the 670 to get to and from campus. When the pandemic hit, Sánchez Gómez struggled to find a job, in part because many places that were hiring were difficult to reach by bus. Eventually, a friend helped her secure work at a child care center. “It’s nice that this bus runs because it drops me off pretty close [to work]. It’s just not nice how unreliable it can be,” she said. Sánchez Gómez added that she is grateful that her employer and professors are fairly flexible, as she estimates that late or canceled buses have made her late for work or class once per week this semester.

Complaints about reliable service are hardly limited to the UT shuttles. Like Sánchez Gómez, Thelma Yolanda Urrea doesn’t have a car, which has been an adjustment for her. Her car was totaled three years ago; since then she has relied on the bus, which has presented challenges. “They changed the route and now the bus stop is very far from the [VA] clinic,” Urrea said. She filed a complaint with Cap Metro but never heard back.

Despite some of its shortcomings, almost all riders we interviewed mentioned aspects of using public transit that they enjoy. Melissa Brewer moved to Austin from West Texas about six years ago, from an area where public transit wasn’t an option. Now, she pops in her earphones and listens to heavy metal (her favorites are Lamb of God, Megadeth, and Soundgarden) for her 40-minute ride to work at Luby’s. “I like it. It’s convenient,” she said while waiting for the bus at the North Lamar Transit Center.

Chicken or the Egg

Wei Li, an associate professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, can empathize with Brewer’s transitless past. He wishes he had the public transit access that Austinites enjoy in the College Station area. He said he would need to walk about 30 minutes between bus stops if he wanted to go from his home to campus. The drive is just 15 minutes. “I [would] have to be really precise, otherwise I [would] miss the bus and have to wait another hour,” he said.

Li said a shift toward remote and hybrid work during the pandemic has compounded problems for public transit agencies. “There is a lot of discussion among the public transportation agencies because they all face the same problem: a sharp decline in ridership,” Li said.

Indeed, part of the problem with reliability stems from how the pandemic has continued to wreak havoc on public transit systems. That said, September was the first month that Cap Metro had 2 million riders – a milestone it hadn’t reached since Feb­ruary 2020. Overall, it has regained about 70% of its ridership numbers from before the pandemic – likely thanks in part to the city’s continued growth. Cap Metro’s rebound is comparable to public transit agencies across the country. According to the American Public Transportation Assoc­i­a­tion, public transportation ridership nationwide reached over 70% of the pre-pandemic level in September, compared to about 20% in April 2020.

As a result of the change in work behavior, Cap Metro has slashed some of its commuter lines that provide service to outlying parts of the city. Cap Metro Board Member Wade Cooper noted the quandary that Cap Metro now faces with these commuters during the September board meeting. “I worry about us foreclosing the commuters. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. They’re not going to ride it if it’s not there, and we’re going to take a beating for having empty buses going down MoPac if we do put them [out]. But I think we need to think more strategically about, as a board, what our objectives are going to be, because … a lot of people are trying to figure out do I come, do I not come in,” Cooper said.

Watkins said if a passenger was transported from 2019 to the present day, commuter buses would be one of the most significant differences they would notice in Cap Metro’s operations. “We run a significantly reduced commuter bus operation than what we were running before, and in the months immediately before the pandemic, our commuter bus network was at crush capacity. I mean it was overloaded,” she said.

She’s not entirely sure when or if the commuter service will return to its pre-pandemic levels thanks to the shift in work behavior. Hybrid schedules have also led to sluggish ridership on Mondays and Fridays. As a result, Watkins hypothesized that Cap Metro might run commuter buses more heavily on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thurs­day. “I don’t have a crystal ball, but it kind of feels like we’re at least for a while going to settle into this pattern,” she added. “But we are in the process of collecting as much data as we can so that we can design a system for the future looking forward that reacts to what people’s behavior patterns are today.” According to a Cap Metro spokesperson, the agency plans to look into the needs of its current customers through an origin and destination survey in the spring of 2023.

Ming Zhang’s perspective on Cap Metro is twofold. As an urban planning professor at UT, Zhang studies megaregional transportation issues. But he also has used Cap Metro to commute since 2005. From his observations, ridership seems to be showing signs of rebounding. “In the past, during the peak times, when I went to the bus or to the train usually I could have two seats for myself. Nowadays, quite frequently I will share the row with somebody else,” he said. “I am optimistic the transit services will regain ridership.”

Zhang said that this optimism is future-looking. He expects it could take more than two years for ridership to return to pre-pandemic levels, as people get more comfortable with the COVID threat. Even then, the ridership might not be the same folks who rode prior to the pandemic. Instead, Austin’s continued population growth could fill the gap of missing riders, he said.

What can Cap Metro do to boost its numbers? Focus on quality, Zhang said. “For example, transit service reliability [and] the on-time performance. For buses, it’s very difficult for them to maintain reliability because they have to share the right-of-way with the traffic. And trains can do that very consistently.”

Improving the Cap Metro Experience

Many MetroRail riders seem more worried about getting prime position for their bikes than finding a seat on the Red Line, the city’s only rail line. But it’s not hard to see why expanding the city’s rail system is a priority of Project Connect. As Zhang said, trains tend to be more consistent because they have dedicated right-of-way. Nearly every month for the past two years, the Red Line has had an on-time rate of around 95%, regularly meeting the agency’s 96% goal for trains.

Riders have taken notice, and, for those who work or live along its 32-mile route, it seems to be a popular mode of transport. Ace Lopez uses the Red Line to get to his classes at ACC Highland. After a recent skateboarding accident, he’s been using public transit more often to get around. “I love it a little more than taking the bus,” Lopez said. He added that the train feels safer and faster than the bus.

Alex Karner, a UT urban planning professor, noted that this level of consistency and reliability could be achieved for buses too in the near term. He said that traffic signals could give priority to buses, or the city could add more dedicated bus lanes Downtown. He added that he hopes that Project Connect doesn’t make Cap Metro lose sight of the needs of its current riders. “I’m worried that it’s kind of shaping up to be a two-­tier system. And this has happened across the country. Notably in Los Angeles in the Nineties, activists there made this case, and in the Bay Area in the early 2000s, activists there made this case, that there was a system for poor people of color who ride the bus, and a system for [a] wealthy, much whiter population that uses rail,” he said.

Karner, who also serves as an ex officio member of Project Connect’s community advisory committee, recently completed a study with a group of students looking into how current riders want to see Project Connect implemented. They identified five themes that came up during interviews and focus groups: reliability, information, affordability and fares, dignity and respect, and safety and street conditions. Among its 10 recommendations, the study states that extensive analysis is needed to ensure that Project Connect integrates with the current bus system. “Layering a new rail system onto an existing bus network always entails winners and losers. Many riders who previously enjoyed a one-seat ride will be forced to transfer from bus to rail. Others who previously took the bus may be able to make their trips exclusively by rail. How different modes are prioritized in the right-of-way will also affect travel times,” the study reads.

The good news? There’s still time to ensure that Project Connect is executed in a way that best serves current riders. How­ever, Karner said, a lot of the issues raised by riders in his study are yet to show up in Project Connect conversations. “We’re talking about Project Connect, we’re talking about mode, we’re talking about stations. We’re not talking about this broader vision of how we create the best public transit system that we possibly can in Austin that is useful for as many people as it can possibly be,” Karner said.

While there’s still time to implement recommendations from Karner’s study, Project Connect is already chugging along. Specif­ic­ally, two of the four new MetroRapid bus lines are on track to begin operating toward the end of 2023. Cap Metro estimates it will need to hire more than 100 operators to run those routes. The first new MetroRail lines – the Orange and Blue lines – are still a bit further off, but the design process continues to trudge forward.

For its part, Cap Metro remains confident that Project Connect can straddle the line between capitalizing on population growth and improving the experience for its existing customers. “Our goal for any service adjustment – from a minor route change to the introduction of a light rail line or forthcoming MetroRapid lines – is to maximize the benefits experienced by the most amount of people,” a Cap Metro spokesperson said in an email. No doubt Cap Metro’s current riders and advocates like Karner will keep a close eye on its progression.

This article appears in November 18 • 2022.