MTD Santa Barbara
Source: MTD Santa Barbara
Effective Monday, April 25, 2022, Santa Barbara MTD will be temporarily lowering service levels in order to improve system reliability. During the COVID-19 pandemic, transit operators nationwide and many other industries have experienced workforce shortages, and MTD is no different. While MTD continues to recruit aggressively for bus operators, the agency has experienced a confluence of retirements and normal attrition causing a drop in the number of available bus operators. This drop coupled with the Omicron surge has meant that various bus trips are occasionally cancelled, causing uncertainty for passengers.
In order to adjust service to a level that the MTD workforce can reliably cover on a daily basis, MTD staff have made surgical changes to service levels that will go into effect as of Monday, April 25, 2022. While these reductions are designed to last for the spring and summer period, MTD will notify the public about any future service adjustments.
“The reliability of our schedules is crucial and due to the current labor shortage the temporary reduction of service is a necessary step,” said MTD General Manager Jerry Estrada. “We hope that these temporary reductions will allow us the time to staff up appropriately and return to higher levels of service later this year.”
The changes are different for each bus line, so passengers are encouraged to review the schedules of the lines they ride in advance of April 25, 2022. Temporary schedule guides are being printed and hard copies will be available at the Transit Center and on-board buses by next week. In the meantime, a pdf of the new schedule guide is available at this link and the public can get further details at sbmtd.gov/reduced. The table on page 2 of this press release describes changes for each bus line.
Drop the mask requirements! Why are bus drivers the last employees outside of the medical sector who are still required to mask up? Spending all day in a hot and soggy face diaper is not very appealing to prospective employees in a tight labor market. Ditch the masks and it will be a lot easier to hire and retain drivers. Ridership will likely increase too.
I bet it would be cheaper and more environmentally sound to eliminate most of the busses all together and replace them with on-demand, ride-share type of service. The busses themselves cost millions, the maintenance and upkeep is high, the routes and times are limited and thus the ridership and revenue is very low, very low.
On the popular routes, keep the busses. On every other cross town route, get rid of them and buy a few mini-vans, or simply contract with Uber / Lyft.
There is no way that the per rider money spent by MTD is a good value. Providing on demand, direct rides for the people who need them at a greatly reduced price is a much better option. Most of this town is not covered by a bus route, most of it is inaccessible to anyone without a car. We need to step away from the ideas of yesteryear if we want to move our society forward and service those in need more efficiently. Currently our local public transportation is grossly underused and incredibly expensive for what it is… Change is needed and its not more million dollar busses that are 80% empty 80% of the time.
Everyone should just by electric cars, then they don’t need to worry about gas prices, bus schedule, and we save the environment too. Win, win, win, it’s that easy.
3:11 PM, there are a lot of people who can’t or shouldn’t drive. The very old and young, those with mental or physical impairments. We need some way for them to get around.
Don’t forget that when you see a publicly funded employee, you have to picture the retired person with a pension you are paying for.
The tipping point comes when for every employee on the job, there is a pension at 90% pay and free medical and dental for life of employee and spouse.
So you are paying for two to do 1 persons work
So lets say you hire an electrician and he charges you $300 per hour…. you say whoa there, $300 per hour?
Yeah, Wally retired last week. You are lucky because Suzi retires next week and you’d be looking at $450
Wow, to actually believe that was a sound idea except for it not addressing those who can’t/shouldn’t drive shows how pie in the sky some think. That comment was towards several of our out-of-touch leaders who’ve told the public they should just buy electric cars to save money on gas.