Harlan Ingram usually finds herself waiting for Metro’s route 19 after she gets off her third-shift job at Christ Hospital in Mount Auburn. Her early-morning commute back to College Hill will take at least 45 minutes — and that’s if everything goes smoothly.
Oftentimes it doesn’t.
“I’ve had problems with the 19 since I first started coming down here,” she says, noting that the route often comes late and occasionally seems to not show up at all. “That and the 41 (a cross-town route that runs through College Hill) have been the worst for me.”
The struggles many Metro riders face came briefly into focus during this year’s mayoral and city council elections. But as the campaigns close up shop and winning candidates prepare for swearing in, it’s unclear what solutions are coming for those who depend on Metro. In the meantime, officials have warned that things could get worse before they get better.
The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, which oversees the city’s buses, has warned of possible major route reductions and fare increases if Metro’s sagging budget isn’t shored up soon. That comes ahead of a ballot initiative next year that would ask Hamilton County residents to pay for bus service for the first time in decades.
Metro, which provided 15 million rides last year, has already planned on reductions and restructuring of several routes to save money. Service on Routes 1, 28, 29x, 32, and 49 will be reduced in various ways starting Dec. 3. Changes to those lesser-used routes are expected to save about $500,000 a year.
“Unless we find additional funding, we’re facing significant deficits that could require major service reductions beginning in 2019,” Metro CEO Dwight A. Ferrell said when SORTA released its 2018 budget earlier this month. “At the same time that we’re working aggressively … to improve service and get people to jobs, funding for our current system is not keeping pace with costs. The old model is broken, both in terms of service delivery and funding.”
The 19 Ingram relies on every day is one of Metro’s most popular routes, but it only comes once an hour. Dependability-wise, it’s gotten better in the past few years. In 2014, it was at least five minutes late one out of five times, according to data from SORTA. These days, it’s late one time out of eight. That’s the average for all Metro buses this year.
“In the summertime, it’s at least hot, but in the wintertime — that’s a catch 22 right there,” Ingram says about waiting for a bus that may or may not show up on time, or at all. “It runs when it wants to. And if I miss it, guess what — I may have to wait an hour.”
Other riders have it worse. Passengers on the 16, which runs from Mount Healthy to downtown, saw their buses arrive more than five minutes late 20 percent of the time this year. Riders waiting for the 67, which runs from downtown to Sharonville, where many jobs are located, faced similar chances of catching a bus that is significantly late. CityBeat requested data on how often buses miss routes entirely, but Metro says it doesn’t compile that information.
There are a lot of reasons for the lags and dropped routes. Metro’s fleet is aging, with 101 of roughly 400 buses past the 12-year lifespan recommended by the Federal Transit Administration. Those buses cost more to fix and break down more often, meaning service interruptions. Metro has also experienced driver shortages and has had to press more drivers into overtime service.
SORTA runs its finances well, according to Ohio State Auditor David Yost’s office. The office Nov. 28 gave SORTA its Auditor of State Award with Distinction for a clean audit that found no problems with record keeping and financial practices.
But even tightly accounting for every dollar, Cincinnati’s bus system continues to face big financial challenges. Though a $98.1 million 2018 budget SORTA’s board released earlier this month narrowly avoids deficits, the city’s Metro bus system faces a $188 million shortfall over the next decade under current funding conditions.
And that’s just to keep the status quo. An independent report released by consultants AECOM in January found Metro would need at least $1 billion in upgrades over the next 10 years to make it more functional and get more county residents to the region’s jobs.
A 2015 study of Metro’s reach commissioned by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, the Urban Land Institute and other organizations found that only 23 percent of jobs in the city are easily reachable by public transit. Many others take more than 90 minutes to reach by bus.
And about 40 percent of jobs in the city — some 75,000 — aren’t reachable by transit at all. All told, the city ranks lower than 11 other peer cities when it comes to job accessibility via public transit, including regional neighbors Louisville, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh, as well as cities like Denver and Austin, Texas.
The bus system’s budget this year relies on some $56 million from the city’s transit fund, which has paid for buses since 1973 with a .3 percent city earnings tax. The bulk of the rest of the money will come from bus fares ($18.9 million) and federal sources ($11.5 million). Ohio ranks 45th among states when it comes to public dollars per capita spent on transit, even though it ranks 14th in ridership. In 2015, Ohio, the nation’s seventh-most populous state, spent just 63 cents per person on public transit. In contrast, every other one of the nation’s 10 most-populous states spent dollars, not cents, per person.
This year, SORTA got just $800,000 from the state of Ohio.
Making the situation more difficult, Hamilton County doesn’t pay for transit. Cuyahoga, Franklin and six other Ohio counties pitch in for their transit authorities.
SORTA’s board has voted to put a sales tax levy on next year’s Hamilton County ballot to improve Metro’s funding. The amount of that levy has yet to be decided but could range between .5 and 1 percent — the most it can ask voters for without approval from Hamilton County commissioners.
But not everyone agrees that is the right move. Hamilton County Commission President Todd Portune has asked SORTA to reconsider its ask as he works on a plan to establish a larger regional transit system encompassing eight counties and 200 municipalities in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Last year, Portune discouraged SORTA from making a similar ballot request in 2017.
Before that ballot initiative, SORTA’s board could also raise fares by 15 cents to $1.90 per ride. That fare increase would take place in June next year. It would be the first such increase since 2009. SORTA says it will hold public forums about the potential increase before making its decision. The money would go to buying new buses, according to the transit authority. By next year, SORTA says it will have 101 buses that are more than a dozen years old and past their normal functioning lifespan.
Local transit activists agree that Metro’s situation is dire. A group calling itself the Better Bus Coalition has been advocating for SORTA’s transit levy, but has also released its own plan for ways to shore up Metro service, including envisioning new rapid-transit bus routes with fewer stops to serve riders more quickly.
Like Ingram, the Christ Hospital worker, Coalition founder Cam Hardy often takes the 19 and other routes that run through his neighborhood of Mount Airy to his job downtown. He says he has seen firsthand how tough it can be for bus riders.
“There are a ton of people at these bus stops where I live who are waiting on buses that never show up,” he says. “That’s ridiculous.”
In addition to putting pressure on elected officials and calling for the mayor to put regular bus riders on SORTA’s board (currently, there are none), Hardy and other members of the Better Bus Coalition have been working on a plan they say could help. They’ve crunched data, held community input sessions and talked to community groups, riders and business owners who employ them.
Their proposal, released earlier this month, envisions 11 transit hubs around Hamilton County in places like Northside, University of Cincinnati, Mount Healthy, Anderson, Kenwood and elsewhere. It would add more cross-town routes and express routes from downtown. It would also introduce two bus rapid transit routes. BRT systems generally give buses a dedicated lane and priority at intersections and also feature measures meant to streamline the boarding and fare-paying process to speed up service.
“When you think of bus rapid transit, you think of buses coming every 10 minutes, they’re not stopping as often,” Hardy says. “It just speeds your time up. There’s no reason it should take 50 minutes to get anywhere in this city. You should be able to crisscross this city in 30 minutes.”
To pay for this $197 million-a-year vision, the Coalition has endorsed a .75 percent Hamilton County sales tax increase, among other funding sources.
Hardy admits the plan is just the beginning, acknowledging that there are a lot of pieces to the transit puzzle. But he says something has to change.
“We’re just trying to start the conversation, because, quite frankly, the conversation has never been had,” he says. “We’ve never seen significant investment in our public transportation system. We as bus riders have said, ‘enough is enough.’
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 6, 2017.