8 minute read
On the Struggle Bus
It’s easy to understand how she missed her ride. Santa Fe Trails, the city’s bus service, has not posted any information at the mall “transit hub”—or any other major bus stops around town—about route schedules or cancellations. There aren’t even maps to tell riders where the city’s buses travel. Signs on the city’s bus stops direct riders to a website, TakeTheTrails.com. But it is just
If you manage to find a bus schedule, the picture is pretty bleak: Five of the city’s 10 bus routes are no longer running regular service but instead have transitioned to
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That means there is no regular Santa Fe Trails bus service to some of the city’s biggest employers and institutions, such as Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, Santa Fe Community College, Museum Hill, the Institute for American Indian Arts or St. John’s College.
“They need to get the routes back up, more often and later,” Tenorio says, arguing the city should run buses more frequently and later into the evening, otherwise riders are simply stranded.
To be sure, the COVID-19 pandemic upended public transit systems around the world. Timetables built around the finely tuned rhythms of commuters fell apart as many began working from home and schools closed. Tourism slowed and many transit systems cut back to providing only basic service while transit workers faced deadly risks on the job.
A regional bus system in Northern New
Mexico and the Rail Runner both cut back service, but Santa Fe was supposed to have a plan.
Just last year, Mayor Alan Webber and the City Council adopted a multimodal transition plan—the result of thousands of surveys as well as extensive study by outside consultants.
The plan called for a series of changes to Santa Fe’s bus system, some ambitious but others long overdue.
In the short term, those plans included restoring regular service on two routes to better serve the Midtown and South Capitol neighborhoods; extending service on Saturdays across the city; and improving the bus system’s website and bus stops to provide riders with better information.
To date, the city has not completed a single one of those goals.
Meanwhile, the Transit Advisory Board— the appointed group meant to oversee Santa Fe’s bus system—has not met in years.
“I don’t think the bus service is as good as it needs to be but I don’t think it’s not important,” says Mayor Alan Webber, who worked extensively on transit issues before he was elected to lead the city in 2018.
Webber tells SFR the city has been hamstrung in implementing its new plan due to a a vacancy in the leadership of Santa Fe Trails.
City officials also cite staffing among the transit system’s rank-and-file. Public Works Director Regina Wheeler told councilors at a budget hearing last month that 30 of about 50 bus driver positions are unfilled.
“We’re down to our core crew of people,” Thomas Martinez, director of operations and maintenance for Santa Fe Trails, said at the same hearing.
But the union representing drivers says the city simply isn’t paying as much as bus operators with commercial drivers licenses can earn elsewhere. And the city isn’t offering the sort of incentives touted by Albuquerque, which is advertising bonuses of up to $2,500 for new drivers.
The mayor and council approved a multimodal transition plan last year that sets a long list of goals for the city’s bus system.
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• Return Route 5 and Route 6 with Streamlined Route 6
• Expand Saturday service
• Restore the Historic District Shuttle
• Drop the first Route 2 weekday run
• Establish new bus stops as needed for revised new routes
• Continue bus stop improvement program
• Obtain app-based software
• Implement Southwest and Museum Hill Microtransit Services
• Revise Santa Fe Ride application and travel training programs, review dispatching and service costs
• Implement marketing and public information improvements
• Continue development of the Southside Transit Hub
• Implement improvements to the Downtown Transit Center
• Conduct a study for location and programming of Midtown Transit Hub
• Conduct a study of Transit Signal Priority on the Cerrillos Road corridor
• Purchase 12 paratransit vehicles and 3 cutaway vehicles
• Implement revisions to Routes 1 and 4 to serve Midtown
• Add service to the airport by modifying Route 26
• Continue bus stop improvement program
• Continue marketing/public information program
• Open Southside Transit Hub and shift routes
• Depending on rate of development, implement Tierra Contenta and Las Soleras Service
• Conduct a study to expand microtransit service, based on implemented services
• Develop funding and detailed engineering plans for implementation of Transit Signal Priority
• Prepare plans for Midtown Transit Hub and obtain funding
• Purchase 8 heavy duty buses
• Implement Transit Signal Priority
• Construct Midtown Transit Hub
• Continue bus stop improvement program
• Continue marketing/public information program
• Purchase 1 heavy duty bus
• Continue bus stop improvement program
• Continue marketing/public information program
Still, the city needs more residents and visitors alike to ride the bus.
Transportation remains the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Santa Fe, according to a report from city officials on 2021 data.
The same report said encouraging public transportation and improving infrastructure to make the city more walkable and bikeable have some of the greatest potential for reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.
While more zero-emission electric vehicles are hitting the road, including in some city departments, they won’t unsnarl Santa Fe traffic or help local residents who are too young or too old to drive. Meanwhile, the cost of owning a vehicle continues to increase and the share of households behind on auto loans has risen.
Riding the city’s buses this spring, this writer has seen glimmers of a Santa Fe that isn’t so easily dismissed as one only navigable by car. Yes, there have been times I’ve had a bus stop all to myself at rush hour. But I’ve also ridden buses crowded with students headed to class and helped tourists navigate a bus system that can still get them to much of what they want to see.
For many, a walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented Santa Fe already exists—because it has to.
Some pending improvements could make Santa Fe’s bus system a more enticing alternative for residents and visi- tors alike. The city is moving ahead with designs for renovating the currently neglected and unaccommodating downtown transit center on Sheridan Street. City officials also have plans to build a transit hub on the Southside at Cerrillos Road and Camino Entrada.
A yawning gap remains between the role that city officials have assigned to public transportation in helping create a cleaner, more equitable Santa Fe and the bus network, which provides poor service to swathes of the community that most need it, while doing little to entice new riders.
Santa Fe’s transit system is relatively young given the age of the city.
Created only in 1991 when voters approved a gross receipts tax to fund it, buses didn’t start rolling until 1992. Today, it’s
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ROUTES OPERATING ON DEMAND
ROUTES OPERATING ON REGULAR SERVICE
• Purchase 1 cutaway vehicle
• Continue bus stop improvement program
• Continue marketing/public information program
SANTA 5 6
24 26
1
FE TRAILS ROUTES M 21 22
SOURCE: CITY OF SANTA FE SOURCE: CITY OF SANTA FE an enterprise fund within the city’s budget, which means it’s meant to pay for itself. While the system receives gross receipts tax revenue, it also receives substantial federal funding. And while other cities have scrapped transit fares altogether, Santa Fe is still charging a buck a ride—though students and veterans ride free and other discounts are available. Santa Fe Trails has never been a money maker for the city, though, and was never meant to be.
Some of the same problems that plagued the rollout of the system, still confound it today.
Some city officials argued in the early 1990s that the system concentrated service on the north end of town while neglecting the south side. That’s an issue still reflected in recent rider surveys and in mounds of economic data that show the highest concentrations of people who rely on public transit are in Midtown and on the Southside, where residents often face longer walks to bus stops and limited service.
Even though regular service has been suspended on half of Santa Fe’s bus routes, city officials argue the system that has replaced it is actually a pretty good deal.
Known as on-demand service, it works like this: Instead of going to a bus stop at a time listed on a bus schedule, you go to the bus stop and dial a phone number to ask a bus pick you up.
“On-demand is actually more accessible,” Martinez, the head of Santa Fe Trails, told councilors during a hearing last month.
This type of system works on riders’ schedules, he argued.
And Webber says this kind of service offers a glimpse at the future of public transit, one focused on the mobility of individual passengers rather than just bus routes.
“We need to focus on providing mobility, rather than only seeing our challenge as better bus service,” Webber says.
The system has also required riders to spend a lot of time waiting for a ride on sometimes empty buses. And the city’s multimodal transition plan notes that this service relies on riders having a phone, which some don’t.
Transit experts also say there’s a big limitation to this type of system. By its nature, on-demand service can only serve a fraction of the riders that could be served by a bus route running on regularly scheduled intervals.
Many bus systems have moved to this sort of “demand response” service, allowing transit agencies to reach riders in areas where there might not be enough passengers to justify running buses on a fixed schedule.
“Demand response is just another way of getting more service into more places,” says Jarrett Walker, a consultant to public transit agencies who authors the blog HumanTransit.org.
Walker tells SFR that this kind of service has “extremely low maximum productivity,” adding later, “it cannot handle more than five, six, seven people per hour.”
In fact, there’s a sort of paradox to this service.
If the city truly encouraged more people to ride the bus, the system could be overwhelmed by too many calls for service.
So, it works “as long as everyone involved is clear that this only works because not many people are using it,” Walker says.
The multimodal transition plan approved last year calls for replacing regular bus service entirely with a sort of on-demand service in the Museum Hill and community college areas in the future and extending an on-demand bus service to the airport.
Yet the plan doesn’t entirely dismiss the idea of regular bus service. It calls for: more frequent bus service on routes 24 and 26, which serve the Southside, including the future teen center and Presbyterian’s new facility off Cerrillos Road; increasing the frequency of service on some routes during Saturday as well as extending the hours on several routes to 10 pm.; and restoring regular schedules along route 5 and an amended route 6, which would ensure there’s bus regular to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, the state capitol and along Rodeo Road.
The shortage of drivers has extended to the city’s paratransit service, Santa Fe Ride, which provides a door-to-door taxi-like service for people with disabilities.
It can be a lifeline, but over the years she has used it, Mary McGinnis has seen the service change. Rides aren’t available as late in the evening as they once were. And passengers should arrange trips well in advance, she says.
“Drivers are working so much overtime,” says McGinnis, who previously served on the city’s Transit Advisory Board.
The drivers who remain are competent and helpful, she says, but there aren’t enough of them
“We’ve adjusted to it because what else can we do?” McGinnis says.
Getting more buses on regular routes will take more drivers, however.
The union representing city employees— including bus drivers—says officials haven’t made transit a priority, a point they argue is reflected in the pay the city offers new hires.
Wages on job postings for bus drivers range from a high end of about $24 an hour to as little as $15 an hour.
“These are skilled workers,” says Louis Demella, vice president of AFSCME Local
