The Fox Cities Transit Commission met on 07/27/2021.
The largest portion of the meeting was the discussion around and vote on the schedule changes that General Manager Ron McDonald had proposed as a way to handle lower ridership numbers and a shortage of bus drivers.
Before taking that up, they did have to approve the June payments. Administrative Services.
Manager Deb Ebben reported that the current year-to-date price of diesel was $2.17/gallon, and they had budgeted for $3/gallon. The year-to-date average price of gasoline was $2.01/gallon and they had budgeted for $2.50/gallon. The payments were approved unanimously.
They then moved on to the schedule change Ron was asking to implement. He had sent an email to the committee which he elaborated on.
They had been monitoring the ridership which is about half of what it would be in a normal year. On top of that, they’re facing a shortage of employees. Their Table of Organization includes 36 full time drivers, but they currently only have 26. They will have another full-time driver starting September and are actively interviewing and conducting background checks on other applicants, but Ron didn’t see the overall driver shortage being corrected any time soon.
They analyzed their ridership data and looked at their routes to see what sort of adjustments they could make to help deal with both of those issues. It seemed the best opportunity, and really only, opportunity for them to find any savings would be eliminating the peak service during the week. They were primarily looking at 7 of their 18 routes from which they wanted to remove 2.5 hours of revenue service and change these routes to only leave the transit station once an hour during the day, in the evenings, and on Saturday. The other routes were already running on an hourly schedule, so wouldn’t need to be changed. The one exception to these changes would be for Route 9 which Ron recommended keeping the way it is since it’s designed primarily to serve senior citizens and people with disabilities.
Essentially, they wanted to move the entire system, with the exception of Route 9, to an hourly schedule. That would result in about a 9% reduction in revenue service hours on each week day. They could understand that would affect some customers, but Valley Transit was in the same situation that everyone else around the country was and they needed to tighten their belt and try to provide an environment where their employees could work reasonable shifts.
Ron recommended approve of this temporary modification. Then as the number of job applicants as well as ridership increased, they could come back and look at making changes. He added that, at that point, they could probably review the entire system, review the ridership data, and see where the increased ridership goes post-Covid because it might change from what it was pre-Covid.
The Commission Vice-Chair said he didn’t recall Valley Transit having to do something like this before and thought it would be a significant change for some folks. He asked how it would be communicated to potential riders and when it would be implemented.
Ron said they wanted to implement it before school started on September 1st. If the commission approved these changes, they’d start working on messaging immediately and would use all the channels they could including social media, their website, posters inside the buses, and signboards in the transit center. He said a lot of their best communication comes from the drivers talking to passengers.
Larry Wurdinger thought this was a good solution to the problem. He said some people had suggested cutting evening service, but that wasn’t a good solution because at 8:30 at night, there’s no other option. Most passengers will be able to adjust to this situation pretty easily because the schedule would become what it already is mid-day and on Saturday when they know there’s only one bus and hour. It will be a minor inconvenience but it won’t really take service away from anybody whereas, ending service at 8pm at night, as some people had suggested, would leave some people, such as those who work at the mall until 9pm with no other options. This change, however, he didn’t think would be a major adjustment for passengers.
Ron was glad he had brought that up. He said when he looked at all the alternatives, one of the first things he considered was whether they could cover the evening service with their connector or VTII service; however, when they looked at their ridership data, they discovered that even at 8-9pm they were transporting 60-80 people per hour which was way beyond the capacity they could handle with the connector service. In essence, they would have ended up stranding everybody. The other alternative was the recommendation they ultimately made regarding peak service. They did understand it was going to inconvenience some people, but it beat the heck out of being stranded with no other options.
Ron said this was something had never done before in his over 30 years working in transit, and he didn’t take it lightly. He had been losing a lot of sleep thinking about it because, even though there are options, it still disrupts people’s lives, and their purpose was to provide transportation.
Chairman George Dearborn asked if there were any options for riders who absolutely had to get somewhere during those peak periods. He wondered if taxis would be their only choice.
Ron said that, depending on where they lived, there might be a connector option available to them. But this schedule adjustment was really the least bad of all the options.
Another commission member said he agreed. Taking away service was a terrible idea, but schedule adjustments were normal. It sounded like he had experience with some kind of train or subway system and he mentioned that they frequently would suspend the express train depending on the flow or the time of the year.
Ron mentioned again that this would also have the benefit of allowing Valley Transit to regroup and try to figure out how they were going to come out of Covid. Would the peak service they were currently running even going to be the best solution post-Covid? They’d be able to evaluate ridership data and follow it.
Commission Member Carol Kasimor asked if the commission approved this would it to the Appleton Common Council for approval?
Ron said the Common Council would not need to vote on it because this was an operational issue which the commission had authority over. It would, however, go to the Council as an informational item.
Commission Member Mike Patza asked if there had been any communication or discussion with the Appleton Area School District regarding this change. He thought this schedule change might impact them.
Ron had not talked to them and said that, quite honestly, AASD changes their times without consulting Valley Transit. (There were some chuckles about that.) He did mention some kind of service the name of which I couldn’t not understand that they run during peak times, and he anticipated they would still be operating that.
A Commission Member asked if they had any expectations about which way the ridership was going to move. Basically, if a bus had been coming every 30 minutes and now it was coming every hour, did they think people would opt to show up for the bus that was 30 minutes before their usual bus or wait for the one that was 30 minutes after their normal one. He did expect that the buses would be under capacity regardless until overall ridership picked up.
Ron said that was a good point but didn’t anticipate capacity being an issue. Their current busiest route in the system is Route 15 which blows every other route away. It only runs once an hour and does fill up, but it’s okay to have some people standing. He said that, frankly, he hoped capacity would become an issue down the road because it would mean they were returning to where they should be.
Chairman Dearborn asked when this would happen.
Ron answered that he expected it to be the last week in August because they wanted to get it implemented before school starts. They did need to work things out with the drivers and there was a lot of work that had to happen in the background before it was implemented.
The Commission approved it unanimously.
Chairman Dearborn commented that, unfortunately, it was what they had to do.
They then moved onto information items.
Deb Ebben reviewed the June income statement.
They should have been at 50% of the annual budget for June. Their revenues continued to be underbudget because of lost ridership due to Covid. Their expenses, salaries, and fringe benefits were underbudget overall even though they were over in their overtime expenses, which was a result of being short drivers. They were slightly over budget in administrative expenses. They were underbudget in supplies and materials and purchase services. They were over budget in their utilities, but she said that should even out before the end of the year. They were a little bit over budget in repairs and maintenance. Overall expenses were underbudget at the end of June, and they continue to be more underbudget in expenses than they are in revenues.
She then reviewed the June ridership and revenue numbers.
Their year-to-date fixed route ridership continues to be lower than normal when compared to last year. However, this June looks better than last year’s June. Their fixed route ridership was 42,445 compared to a typical June of over 67,000 riders, but compared to last year they were up about 5,000 rides. Their year-to-date ridership is below last year by 66,000 rides, but that gap is closing.
Ridership is picking up in all of the fare categories. Year-to-date revenues are still less than last year but that gap is also closing. She said the transit center reopened to the public on June 7th, and they hoped that would bring back some of their riders.
The ADA and Ancillary services have increased when compared to last year but they’re still lower than a typical year. Their total year-to-date ridership shows a decrease of approximately 60,000 rides compared to last year.
They then moved onto the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Report
Ron said that normally they would bring a KPI report, but they did not bring one this month. They’re working with their new enterprise database contractor on that. This software company can provide KPI data in pre-prepared packages which they do for transit systems all over the country. Valley Transit is trying to align with what their peers are reporting, so their working through things with the software company and hope to bring a report to the commission when the next quarterly report is due. They’re looking forward to having this data in their new database so they can just hit a button and spit it out rather than having their Transit Operations Specialist spend an entire trying to extract data for KPI. He did note that there had not been a substantial change between the first quarter [which was reported during the April meeting] and the second quarter, and the commission would not have seen anything different in the trends.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=859395&GUID=32CBD6DB-4765-4862-84AB-B4E284E31843&Options=info|&Search=
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