BRTA Tables a Route Pause While Looking for More Drivers
PITTSFIELD, Mass. – The BRTA Advisory Board tabled a proposed route cancellation last week.
During its meeting, Administrator Kathleen Lambert proposed to the board the idea of cancelling Route 921 for 90 days to help train four of the new hires who do not have a CDL. Lambert said the suggestion came from both the incoming operating company, Transdev, and the outgoing company, Keolis.
The new general manager from Transdev, Mark Moujabber, introduced himself to the board, citing his over 20 years of experience in the transit industry. He noted the four new drivers for the fixed route and two new paratransit drivers.
"Training-wise, we've got four drivers right now for the fixed route, fixed route operators. They're there, they don't have their CDL, so we're training them and helping them to get their CDLs, and then we've got two paratransit drivers in training as well, so they're in their second week, I think. So, right now they're learning skills, and then after that, they'll go on the road and learn routes, and hopefully within a few weeks, we'll get them out in service."
The team is still hiring drivers, needing about six more for the fixed route.
Moujabber said it will take about 90 days to get the new hires trained and CDL certified. Suspending Route 921 would free up two drivers to cover more popular routes and have more coverage for call-outs and vacations from other drivers.
"There were five call outs total, so two two people were on vacation, three called out sick, so that's five drivers, that brings us down to 20 drivers, and even with all the staff we have, we can't cover the shifts, and since coverage is one of the important pieces of what we're trying to operate here, the Route 2 covers everything that the 921 does, except for speed," Lambert said.
Route 921 is the express service from Pittsfield to Great Barrington, making stops in Lee, Lenox, and Stockbridge. If it were paused, riders would then rely on Route 2, Pittsfield to Lee, and Route 21, Lee to Great Barrington. Moujabber said they extended Route 21 to make it go a little longer to be able to cover.
Board member Rene Wood was disappointed and unsure of the need to cancel the service, and thought it was unfair to do this to South County, and why other routers are not being targeted.
Lambert cited the route as being the least used, the numbers weren't available in the meeting, but Lambert shared with us afterwards that there were only 173 individual trips last month, which is normal for the route, Lambert said.
Some members were sympathetic to the difficult situation Lambert and the operations teams are facing, but member Stuart Lawrence said without much information for the board to compare, it is difficult to make a decision today.
"I'm happy to consider all possibilities for adjusting service to cope with the shortage of resources, but without ridership numbers and without a clear comparison of alternatives, I don't think that this is a well-presented proposal. There are other routes, there are other riders, and there's appropriate data to compare alternatives. I don't think we're doing that in a very competent way if we're just guessing."
The board decided to table the discussion.
Chair Douglas McNally suggested to Lambert, if the route has such low ridership, why don't they use a smaller bus that does not require a CDL?
"It seems silly to put a large bus there with six people on it and give up the time rather than take advantage of the fact that you don't have to have a CDL to drive a smaller bus," he said.
Lambert says she completely agrees with McNally’s statement, but the union does not. She says they are speaking with the union again on Monday to suggest the community shuttle bus program and to use smaller buses.
She said that she does not think the service should be cut at all, as their service is already "baseline" to begin with, and that once they have better data, they will be able to grow and figure out the best use of their service.
"Once we can do that, and we can get better data about how our service is running, is it running on time? We can see bus stop data, so we can know where people are standing catching the bus. Okay, that's really important. Once we do that, then we can start looking at, well, gosh, is this route efficient anymore? Are there enough trip generators along this area to make this fixed route viable? Maybe it should be micro transit, maybe it should be some other kind of service. We can't do that until we have the proper planning tools to be able to really understand where the service needs to go next," Lambert said.
Lambert said they are already on the way to getting better data with the recent fix to their passenger counting software, as for months, it was not downloading all the data, making it look like they had much lower ridership than in reality, as well as upgrading their IPS system.
Tags: BRTA,
