Officials say changes to public transportation in Hampton Roads are overdue.
A national bus driver shortage started before the COVID-19 pandemic, which certainly didn’t help the issue, said Karen Kitsis, chief planning and development officer at Hampton Roads Transit.
“We haven't had enough operators to run our full schedule,” she said.
HRT is short roughly 40 operators out of the 471 needed to be fully staffed, HRT spokesperson Thomas Becher said.
And the regional public transportation provider hasn’t made big changes to its bus network since 1999, he added.
“It was ready for an overhaul because job centers change, development changes, where people move changes,” Becher said.
The Transportation District Commission of Hampton Roads approved a plan to switch up HRT’s bus system starting in May 2027. Changes include discontinuing 14 bus routes across the region that are redundant or unpopular, running buses on the most used routes every 15 minutes during peak hours and adding new stops.
“We looked across our entire service on the local bus side and said which ones are not performing perhaps as we would like them to, which ones might be suited to a different form of service,” Kitsis said.
Stops along discontinued routes may be absorbed into other routes. In lower-population areas, some stops will be replaced with the OnDemand Ridesharing program, which lets riders call a car through HRT – similar to how they would request an Uber or Lyft – to drop them at a final destination within the defined zone or a bus stop to connect them with the wider system.
“We will not be leaving people without options,” Kitsis said.
The plan identifies 13 “regional backbone” routes that go between popular destinations across the region. HRT will reallocate resources from the discontinued routes so buses along these routes can run every 15 minutes during peak hours, instead of every 30 minutes or hour.
“You don't need to check a schedule, and that is a big game changer,” Kitsis said.
HRT is also adding new stops. Last month, HRT started service between Norfolk and the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Virginia Beach. Next year, buses will run from Downtown Norfolk to the Norfolk International Airport.
