Rural transit providers reflect on pandemic’s impact

Last month, TriMet announced that it was reducing service on nearly a quarter of its bus routes because of an unprecedented driver shortage - and that’s despite raising pay and bonuses to new drivers. The pandemic has taken a toll on other large mass transit providers as ridership has plummeted, budgets have contracted and labor woes have mounted. But what has the impact been like on rural transit providers who typically have smaller budgets to cover larger service areas than their metro counterparts? We hear from Doug Pilant, the general manager of the Tillamook County Transportation District; Adrian Mateos, the general manager of the Basin Transit Service in Klamath Falls; and Rob Johnson, the transit fleet safety and maintenance manager of Kayak Public Transit in Pendleton.

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Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Last month TriMet announced that it was reducing service on nearly a quarter of its bus routes in the Portland area because of a driver shortage. That was despite raising pay and providing bonuses to new drivers. The pandemic has taken a toll on large mass transit providers all around the country as ridership and revenue have dropped and staffing problems have continued. But what has the impact been like on rural transit providers which typically have smaller budgets and larger service areas than their urban counterparts? We’re going to hear from the leaders of three rural transit services: Doug Pilant, the general manager of the Tillamook County Transportation District; Adrian Mateos, the general manager of the Basin Transit Service in Klamath Falls; and Rob Johnson, the transit fleet safety and maintenance manager of Kayak Public Transit in Pendleton. Doug Pilant, can you give us a sense for what Tillamook County Transportation District offers?

Doug Pilant: Tillamook County Transportation District is a regional transit provider throughout northwest Oregon. We provide intercity bus services from the coast to Portland, up and down the coast from Cannon Beach to Lincoln City and then into Salem. In addition to that we provide on-demand service where we provide a countywide service as well as medical trips for Tillamook County residents to go to medical appointments in Portland. We [also] operate a regional transit transportation brokerage where we coordinate Medicaid rides throughout Tillamook, Clatsop, and Columbia Counties.

Miller: At the lowest point, how big a reduction in ridership did you see?

Pilant: At the lowest point it varied by service type. For example, our Dial-a-Ride on-demand services saw about a 60-70% decline while our inner-city services had a 90% decline and our local fixed routes up and down the coast and within the county experienced about a 50-60% decline, depending on the route.

Miller: What did that mean for revenue?

Pilant: Well, naturally, it meant that we saw a significant decline in fare revenue. Our transit district has a goal to achieve a 15% farebox recovery ratio, which means that we try to generate 15% of revenue from fares to support the services and during the pandemic that dropped down to about 6-7%.

Miller: Did that mean you had to drop the level of services you could provide?

Pilant: Actually, we did not reduce services due to the reduction in fare revenue, but we did reduce services because of the lack of available workforce and the lack of drivers available to perform the work.

Miller: That was from people out sick with COVID-19 or who quit out of fears of COVID-19? What were the various reasons for your workforce shortages?

Pilant: It was a combination. We had our semi-retired workforce which represented about 10% of our driver workforce decided that they would retire. We had other drivers who didn’t want to comply with the TSA mask mandate. We had other drivers move out of the state. And we had a real problem recruiting new drivers.

Miller: Adrian Mateos is with us from Basin Transit Service in Klamath Falls. How much have you had to change the kind of services that you provide because of the pandemic?

Adrian Mateos: We had to adapt. However, BTS (Basin Transit Service) is an outlier when compared to other transit agencies. Our ridership decline was not as significant. Our staffing levels are healthy. We are actually one person above 100% and we did not have to curtail any routes.

Miller: How do you explain that ridership didn’t dip that much? You heard the numbers from Doug Pilant and we’ve seen similar ones from around the state and around the country of gigantic drops in people riding buses or trains or subways, especially early on and in the spring or summer of 2020. Why do you think that didn’t happen in the Klamath Basin?

Mateos: I would credit our success based mostly on our competent, credible, approachable, and very reliable staff, also to the support of key leaders to include Theresa Conley from ODOT, our board of directors, and most importantly the trust of our ridership. We had some proactive planning in decision making and risk mitigation to adapt to some of the decrease in ridership that we witnessed. Just to provide some examples: we didn’t curtail any routes; we used the advantage of having a full staff to mitigate the Federal direction of 50% reduction in capacity per bus, so we continued meeting the standards and the expectations of our customers. We also exceeded the CDC guidelines for bus sanitation. They could see our personnel disinfecting the buses at least every two hours while en route and zero cases were traced back to Basin Transit Service for COVID-19. We were very proactive again about posturing ourselves to mitigate what we saw that was an industry trend.

Miller: What has staffing been like for you over the course of the pandemic?

Mateos: Our trade has been healthy. Something that I need to highlight is that we have maintained a good relationship and communication with our staff. We also have thought outside the box on how to retain our personnel. Our current challenge is not to recruit but to retain the personnel that work for us. As you know, we are now competing against higher wages and higher benefits. We look forward to the upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiation to enhance the livability of our community, not only to the people that we serve, but also the people that support our mission.

Miller: Rob Johnson is with us as well from Kayak Public Transit based in Pendleton and serving a really big area in north central or northeast Oregon. Can you give us a sense of the kinds of services that you’ve had to change because of the pandemic?

Rob Johnson: We really haven’t changed much of what we do as far as our route structure, the services that we provide. Primarily, we run two types of services, a commuter service and fixed route service. We did not have to curtail any of those services, but like many during the worst part of the pandemic, our ridership went from 105,961 in 2019 down to 35,587 in January through December of 2020.

Miller: A drop of two-thirds.

Johnson: Yes. And since we’re totally federally funded through federal and state grants, we don’t charge fares, so it didn’t affect us financially, so to speak. The way that we gauge our revenue is the revenue service miles and the total passenger count. So, to answer your question, we really didn’t have to curtail services, but during the height of the pandemic, April through September of 2020, there were two months–April and May of 2020–that we were completely shut down and the buses did not run at all. Part of that is due to the fact that being a small rural transit agency we’re like a lot of others that we operate on a limited staff. As a pandemic began to really overtake us, we weren’t sure how we were going to be able to deal with that, who was going to be responsible for all the requirements and responsibilities that we ultimately had. One of the things that sets us apart from a lot of other transit agencies is that we are operated by a tribal government. Proactively they assembled what they called their Incident Command Team as the pandemic began to overtake us. The Incident Command Team is comprised of tribal government, general public, and folks from our tribal health clinic. They got together and formulated plans and ways to deal with this so fortunately for us, we did not have to deal with this all by ourselves.

Miller: But it seems like the biggest issue you had to deal with–and there are echoes here of certainly what we heard from Doug Pilant in Tillamook County is staffing. What has staffing been like for you over the course of the pandemic?

Johnson: It really hasn’t affected us a lot. We didn’t lose anybody. We did have several members of our staff that became sick and had to quarantine for a period of time. We’re like everybody else. We’re always short on drivers and trying to recruit and bring people on. But fortunately, we were able to cover everything, even during times of sickness for some of our people. We were able to retain everybody and just pretty much carry on, business as usual, under the circumstances.

Miller: There have been reports nationwide of increased harassment and even assault against some drivers, especially when drivers would say things like, “there are federal requirements, we have to wear a mask. This is not up to me, this is TSA.” Have you or your drivers encountered that kind of thing from passengers since the pandemic began?

Johnson: Unfortunately, yes. It doesn’t happen often, but there have been isolated instances where we have had to call in law enforcement to remove someone from a bus. There are just those few people that don’t seem to understand that this is not us, this is a federal requirement on public transportation vehicles as well as the airlines. We just have to enforce the rules, and we do. Masks are required and it’s not an option.

Miller: Doug Pilant, as a smaller transit agency with a big service area, are you facing different challenges than agencies in bigger cities would?

Pilant: Yes, I would say that because of the characteristics of a small rural agency serving a large service area our budget here is much smaller than the budget of our urban counterparts. As a result, we end up with a smaller amount of cushion or contingency on the direction that things may move. For example, in the reduction of the fare revenue, it was important for us to take advantage of the Cares Act funding to supplement that [revenue]. Urban areas have that option as well, but we have a smaller margin of error. In order to recruit drivers, we negotiated with our union a Driver Hiring and Retention Bonus plan that we were able to fund through the Cares Act. Within a matter of weeks, we were able to offer starting wages that were closer to what our urban counterparts next door like in the TriMet Portland area are offering and that helped us attract a lot more drivers. As a result, a few weeks ago we were able to reinstate much of the service that we had to suspend last September.