Public transit ridership plummeted during the pandemic — not just in Hampton Roads but nation-wide. It’s been recovering ever since.
This is good for the local economy, said Paul Skoutelas, CEO of the American Public Transportation Association.
“For every dollar that's invested in public transportation, there's a $5 economic return,” he told the crowd gathered at the Hampton Convention Center for the State of Transit event Oct. 21.
National, state and regional transit leaders met there to discuss how to improve transit systems to ultimately help more people get where they need to go — and how funding remains an obstacle.
Hampton Roads Transit built 600 shelters in the last year in an effort to provide public transit service with dignity, said William Harrell, who heads HRT.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing a family sitting on the ditch back waiting for the bus,” he said.
The HRT is also using on-demand options that work similar to Uber or Lyft, known as micro-transit, to connect people to buses. Suffolk and Williamsburg are considering offering their own on-demand transit.
Maria Ptakowski, transit manager for the city of Suffolk, said micro-transit could help reach people without access to fixed routes.
But one challenge with micro-transit is cost, said Matthew Scalia, executive director of the Williamsburg Area Transit Authority.
“A bus is expensive, but one driver is one driver,” he said. “Now you've got three cars and three drivers. Now, it's more expensive than that one bus.”
Another priority shared by the three transit authorities is reliability. The abundance of railroad tracks in Suffolk, for example, often makes buses late, Ptakowski said. A possible solution is preemption, which is similar to how a fire truck or ambulance gets through stop lights.
“It won’t make a red light green for us, but it’ll make the light that’s going to potentially turn yellow, stay green a little longer so that bus can continue,” she said. Other possible solutions could be restructuring routes to avoid railroad tracks, she noted.
Frequency is another challenge. One bus an hour isn’t enough, Scalia said. WATA already provides increased frequency along its busiest routes during peak hours, but more is needed, he said.
“We need to make it all-day, and we need to improve that frequency to the other routes as well,” he said. “It's all part of our plan but we need the support to do so.”
Business and economic development leaders in the region have increasingly pointed to a more effective transit network as a prerequisite for growing the region’s economy, but it would require significant, consistent buy-in from lawmakers and member cities.
President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, allocating a trillion dollars over five years for infrastructure projects like public transit.
“It’s got just another 11 months to go, and we're working very hard to see that that investment level continues,” Skoutelas said. The American Public Transportation Association is proposing Congress set aside $138 billion in federal funds over five years for public transit and another $130 billion for freight and passenger rail once the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires, he said.
Local support is just as important, Harrell said.
“We have to remember those critical decisions about where routes are going are made by the local governments, so it's key that they hear and understand the importance of public transit as it supports our regional economy,” he said.