As far as municipal bus systems go, the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC) is better run than most. A survey of 12 similarly sized bus companies showed that GRTC ranked second-lowest in costs per passenger and in the amount of government subsidy received per trip. But, according to David Ress at the Times-Dispatch, rising gas prices are compelling the GRTC to go back to the public well for another dip.
While sky-high gas prices ought to be nudging people out of their cars and into buses, they also jack up the bus company’s operating expenses. CEO John C. Lewis Jr. says GRTC needs another $2 million a year from the City of Richmond, its most generous benefactor, to maintain current levels of service at current fares. The alternative is to raise fares $.25 to $1.50 per ride and probably to cut back on routes. The bus company has daily ridership of 28,000.
Since 2005, when Lewis joined GRTC, gasoline has increased costs from $1 million a year to $4 million a year. The GRTC needs help. But help may be hard to find.
Councilman Bruce Tyler wonders if GRTC could be managed more efficiently. He cites excessive overtime payments and relatively empty buses on certain routes, especially Sunday.
I have little doubt that GRTC could be run more efficiently — I’ve seen plenty of near-empty buses too… Big, gas-guzzling buses carrying only two or three passengers. I can only wonder what kind of bureaucratic entanglement requires the company to run big buses instead of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles on low-volume routes. The small-bus solution is so obvious that some inane and arbitrary rule must be preventing GRTC from trying it.
But the problem is far bigger than GRTC management — which, as I noted, is actually pretty good — or even obtuse government regulations. GRTC is providing shared-vehicle transportation services in one of the most auto-centric regions of Virginia, if not the United States. Development in the Richmond region is scattering across more land, smeared at lower densities, than even Northern Virginia or Hampton Roads.
As a consequence, huge swaths of the region are entirely unsuitable to bus transport. The distances from potential riders’ houses to the logical locations of bus stops are too far to conveniently walk — and, in any case, the streetscapes are inhospitable to pedestrians. Even if passengers persevered, the distances between destinations in the scattered, fragmented counties outside Richmond would mean longer ride times. And then there’s the question of whether there’s anything within walking distance at the destination.
The core market for GRTC is the City of Richmond and adjacent sections of Henrico County, the only places where settlement patterns are suitable for bus transit. But that market is shrinking. As household sizes get smaller, the same amount of housing stock holds fewer people. The city steadily lost population over the past few decades in a trend that appears to have bottomed out only recently. At the same time, spreading affluence has enabled poor people to purchase automobiles and drive themselves. (I know two immigrant women, a mother and daughter, who lived in the city and rode the bus to their jobs as domestics in Richmond’s West End for several years, then purchased a car as soon as they could save the money.)
GRTC’s Lewis is acutely aware that human settlement patterns are antithetical to traditional bus services, and he’s proposed some imaginative ideas to convert Henrico’s Broad Street into a Bus Rapid Transit corridor. But that requires an up-front capital investment that the cash-strapped GRTC doesn’t have.
Bacon’s bottom line: Here’s the irony: Higher gas prices should be a boon to buses. As the cost-benefit equation of driving cars vs. mass transit changes, more people should be opting for buses. Because buses have so much unused capacity, revenue from that ridership should drop straight to the bottom line. While ridership may be up somewhat (the article provides no numbers), it’s clearly not up enough to make up for the spike in gasoline prices. For all practical purposes, most citizens of the Richmond region have no mass transit option. Unless they move to the city (or Henrico), they are stuck in their cars.