“I have a little concern,” said legislator Kathy Nolan at the July meeting of the county Public Transportation Committee, “that if we make our priority providing transportation to everyone just the way they want it in a county this size, it will not be cost-effective.”
Nolan, whose legislative district includes the towns of Olive, Shandaken, Denning and Hardenburgh, was responding to Kingston legislator Phil Erner’s three resolutions to address issues of bus frequency and service distribution throughout Ulster County. Erner had proposed that the service should be accessible to all places designated by census within Ulster County, and that the frequency of available service be at least dependable if it couldn’t be more frequent.
Erner’s district is urban, Nolan’s is rural.
Operating deficits are a universally recognized feature of public transportation. Without a trust fund to prop up transportation operations in local municipalities, public transportation in New York State wouldn’t exist. Even New York City’s subway system, which averages 2.4 million paying riders a day, operates at an annual loss of millions of dollars.
About 85 percent in state and federal aid augment county allocations to keep the Ulster County Area Transit buses running. Since October 1, 2022, riding a bus in Ulster County has required no fare.
UCAT ridership numbers
While it’s true that ridership numbers have been rising since the adoption of the fare-less model, the upward trend is largely the effect of recovery from the artificially suppressed ridership of the pandemic. Only in the last two quarters of this year has the transit agency ridership regained its 2019 numbers.
With a county population of 181,851 residents to serve, UCAT logged 415,029 individual rides the year before the coronavirus outbreak. At the beginning of March 2020, its performance in the new year was on track to outdo even the previous year’s record high ridership. Kingston’s Citibus merger with UCAT in 2019 had also added 30,000 riders to the UCAT numbers.
Then came the mask mandates and the shutdowns of most businesses. In April 2020, only 2835 passengers were recorded riding the buses throughout the county.
The path back year over year has been an incremental, multi-causal road to recovery. 2020’s ridership numbers regained 50,000 riders and 2021 saw another 75,000 return. By the end of 2022, the numbers had rebounded to 300,916 — still 100,000 shy of the 2019’s high-water mark.
The first two quarters of 2023 show the transit agency has made up all the ground it had lost. The ridership numbers for the first six months of 2023 show a modest gain of 1935 rides over 2019’s record-setting ridership numbers, month over month.
Revenue
The amount of revenues (read subsidies) received through the federal urbanized area formula program and state operating assistance are tied directly to the number of passengers recorded and the miles driven while transporting them.
During the last quarter of 2022, 376,022 miles were clocked transporting 85,476 passengers within the UCAT system, triggering state revenues of $1.6 million and federal aid of $3.17 million.
The 2023 adopted county budget for UCAT projected $1.4 million from state aid and $3.35 million from federal sources, while contributing another $1.3 million from ARPA moneys. With ridership numbers back at 2019 levels, aid revenues are expected to be higher than the figure the budget prepared last year had estimated.
Previously, the $1.50 fare charged most riders accounted for 5.3 percent of the revenues generated. When fares stopped being collected, the county was saddled with an additional $300,000 — less than a tenth of one percent of the county’s $351-million 2022 budget — to run the operation. Erner at the time termed that amount a small price to pay for providing the service.
UCAT reported an estimated $8,690,430 a year in expenditures, a $1.5-million increase over the previous year. After state and federal aid, Ulster County’s bus operations were still projected to operate at a $2-million loss.
With ridership numbers surpassing those of 2019, another million dollars or so earned could defray costs.
The X Route
Within this system of subsidization lies the cash incentive to increase the available bus routes as well as the frequency of existing routes. Erner was angling to harness his resolutions to this opportunity at the July committee meeting.
Using the X Route between New Paltz and Newburgh as his poster child, Erner told the tale of activist riders attempting to get the attention of UCAT.
“I learned on a recent trip on the X Route,” said Erner, “that there’s a petition with 50 signatures on it submitted by riders on that route ten years ago that said, We’d like to have buses on the weekend.”
Presently the X Route only operates Monday through Friday.
“They resubmitted that petition seven years ago, same number of signatures, and we didn’t do it then. And then five years ago they submitted it again for the last time …. That’s a lot of riders.”
UCAT director Teri Roser had looked up the numbers as Erner spoke.
“For the X Route, the total trip count for the month [of June] was 692,” said Roser. “So we do pick up a significant number of riders per day.”
Assuming Erner’s X Route petitioners still desire weekend trips to Newburgh, their numbers alone would increase route ridership 30 percent, and the operation would receive more aid.
A change in priorities
Along with his expand-service-and-they-will-ride proselytization, Erner proposes other changes in the county transportation service. One is to have the state take responsibility for part of the county operation, either by running some of the routes itself or by providing additional funding to the county to do so.
“Most of our county buses right now run on state roads,” reasoned Erner. “Why shouldn’t the state offer a public transit option on its state highways as part of its commitment to have state highways? So they give us a [Route] 28 bus, they give us a 209 bus and a 9W bus and a 32 bus. You’re covering most of the current bus routes, especially the long-distance ones. And then we can concentrate on our county routes that need service, which barely have any right now.”
Might regular state bus service persuade people who can drive themselves from point A to point B to take the bus as an alternative to driving themselves in air-conditioned solitude but in cost-measuring effectiveness from point A to point B? Not likely at this time.
Some people think that major incentives or major adjustments in habits or in cultural priorities must and will occur over time. As everyone knows, fewer cars on the road mean less pollution — which is a revenue of a kind, invested in the future.
“This isn’t necessarily saying you got to run a 40-passenger bus in every town in the county,” conceded Erner. “I agree that that doesn’t make sense right now. However, there’s got to be a way for people to get around.”
UCAT epilogue
For now, UCAT is posting good numbers. UCAT is clocking the miles and counting the riders. If ridership continues to increase, so will funding. The agency is beginning to inch its way toward a fully electric fleet by 2030.
Labor costs are a continuing pressure. “We’re still down 15 part-timers,” said Roser referring to the number of bus drivers, “and four full-timers. But we did just hire another mechanic last week, so we’re only one mechanic down.”
UCAT provides 23 routes weekdays, ten routes on the weekends, and paratransit service running parallel to regular routes. It also offers ADA transportation to qualified passengers.
There are 2272 miles of local and state center-line highways of poured asphalt throughout Ulster County. Automobile, truck and bus drivers take the maintenance and repair of these roads for granted as a free public good. Unlike as was the case for toll roads in earlier centuries, drivers expect to pay for local roads in the form of general taxes.
Local bus rides are a Johnny-come-lately innovation in an exurban community that is becoming more aware of the cumulative costs – both economic and environmental – of an increasingly outmoded automobile-dependent way of life.
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