Cleaning a GRTC bus by Greater Richmond Transit Company used with permission.

Facing the worst pandemic in at least a century, transit agencies throughout Virginia and the nation are struggling to balance the needs of their riders, the safety of their operators, and the implications of the coronavirus for their finances.

Take the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC) whose adaptation to the pandemic is one example of how a transit system has had to make critical decisions each day to survive and be there for the people it services.

A quiet launch

It’s hard to imagine a worse time to launch a brand new bus route than in the middle of a global pandemic, yet that is exactly the situation that faced GRTC this past week. After a generous subsidy from the state and decades of demands from local residents, Chesterfield County—Richmond’s southern suburban neighbor—finally agreed last year to add its first ever bus service: a 7.6 mile line down Jefferson Davis Highway to John Tyler Community College in Chester.

Although last week’s launch party for the brand new Route 111 fell victim to the demands of social distancing, after long discussions GRTC and Chesterfield County leaders decided to still let the buses run.

Ridership numbers on the new route will certainly be low over the coming weeks or months, but during a pandemic the true value of transit is to serve as a mobility lifeline for essential workers and people who rely on transit to access grocery stores, healthcare, and other necessary destinations. Studies show that a lack of transportation is one of the top reasons patients cite for delayed care, unfilled prescriptions, and rescheduled or missed appointments.

Please don’t ride

Every morning at 9 am when GRTC’s leadership team sits down for their daily briefing, one of the top figures they pore over is ridership. Normally increasing numbers would be a joy. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, however, they would like to see passenger volumes sink as low as possible.

“Transit is for everyone. It’s where we all come together.” said Julie Timm, GRTC’s CEO. “We know our ridership is dropping, but we still have some routes with a surprising amount of riders. Our buses are a lifeline for so many people, and they cannot function in their daily lives without them. Look at our service now and you can see how people across the region depend on us.”

Ridership numbers released on Friday by GRTC showed a steady decline in the number of people using their buses to get around. On March 16 the agency served 21,637 riders—a drop of 29% compared to the monthly daily average. By March 18 that figure was down to just 18,992 passengers—a 37% reduction versus normal volumes.

Compared with other transit agencies across the country, those numbers are still high. Washington, D.C., New York City, and several cities out West have logged roughly 50 to 80% fewer riders over the past week.

The Transit App is showing demand for its way-finding services down 71% nationwide. Why is ridership in Richmond still strong when other cities are seeing such rapid drops? Passenger demographics may provide an answer to the mystery.

Transit is still a lifeline for many

Whereas WMATA, MTA, and other transit systems in bigger cities serve large chunks of middle class commuters and well-to-do urbanites, GRTC’s ridership is overwhelmingly low-income. On a good day over half of Metro Richmond’s bus passengers come from households below the poverty line. Another quarter don’t earn over $50,000 a year.

That means a far larger share of transit riders in Richmond either cannot afford to stay home from work or they are exactly those workers deemed “essential” in this emergency: grocery store clerks, custodians, and healthcare professionals. With the need for frequent, fast, and reliable transit service still so high in Richmond, what is GRTC doing to protect its operations?

WFH is the new normal

One of the easiest moves for Timm to take was giving all staff that can work remotely the option to telework. Luckily two weeks ago GRTC’s IT department just finished an upgrade to the agency’s technology so company wide teleworking would be possible.

The plan had been more than a year in the works and designed to prevent the customer care department from being impacted by snow days. Now that system upgrade has come in handy for a far more serious crisis. In light of the growing pandemic the vast majority of GRTC’s team who could make the switch have taken Timm up on her offer and are now working from home for the foreseeable future.

After the relative of a staff member was diagnosed with a non-symptomatic case of COVID-19, GRTC immediately instituted a coronavirus policy of placing any employee with a diagnosed relative on 14-day paid sick leave so that they can quarantine themselves and prevent any possible infection.

Even though the employee was on leave even before their relative’s diagnosis and had no opportunity to transmit the virus to any other GRTC staff, Timm decided every precaution must be taken to protect the health of their operators, riders, and other team members.

“We’re balancing lifeline service for healthcare professionals to get to work, for riders to get to dialysis and other medical services they need to stay alive, the health and safety of our drivers, and the economic impact cutting service would have on our community,” Timm said.

New signage showing boarding instructions for riders during the pandemic. Image by Greater Richmond Transit Company used with permission.

All aboard (the back)

To keep as many of GRTC’s bus operators healthy and able to work for as long as possible, the agency has instituted a number of drastic policies being adopted across the country to lower drivers’ contact with passengers.

Riders are being instructed to enter and exit via the back door only and to sit behind the accessibility reserved seating area. Only families with children in strollers or individuals with mobility devices such as wheelchairs will be allowed to board using the front door.

To make back door boarding and such necessary social distancing between vehicle operators and passengers possible, GRTC decided to join a growing number of transit agencies across the country and suspend fare collection for the duration of the outbreak. GRTC hopes those who can still afford their fares will still choose to pay them, but according to Timm, “Any potential gaming of the fare enforcement system to me is less important right now than the public’s health.”

Fare enforcement officers for the Pulse BRT line have been instructed to assist with spacing out riders from the platform so that no one bus gets too crowded. To make that task easier GRTC has begun deploying buses it normally reserves to reduce bunching during rush hour to operate all the time.

So fresh and so clean

To keep its fleet as hygienic as possible GRTC’s cleaning team has never worked harder. All custodial staff are voluntarily working up to fifty hours per week in an effort to clean every bus as frequently as possible with special prioritization for the Pulse and for CARE vehicles which primarily serve older riders.

In an recent interview with Virginia Public Radio’s Jahd Khalil, Pace proudly reported that thanks to their efforts GRTC’s custodial staff “were able to cut the regular rotation of cleaning time in half.”

You get what you pay for

Paying overtime to increase the frequency of cleanings plus suspending fares and running extra buses to assist with social distancing does not add up to sustainable finances for any transit agency, but the costs are necessary to preserve public health, our local economy, and the mobility of healthcare workers themselves.

In a 2009 survey of nearly 3,000 healthcare workers, participants reported reliable transportation as one of the top causes of absenteeism during a pandemic.

The resulting fiscal crunch means GRTC must carefully weigh all options going forward, including the total closure of the bus system should the agency run out of funding. That scary prospect has been made all the more possible due to the recently passed Central Virginia Transportation Authority bill which has paradoxically allowed Richmond and the County of Henrico to propose 50% cuts to GRTC’s funding in their new budgets to take effect this July.

Such scenarios weighed heavily on Timm before she moved forward with suspending fares in the name of public health. “If we stop service do we have enough money to pay our drivers and staff? If we stop running buses will members of our community be stranded and unable to access healthcare or get to work so they can continue to pay their rent and afford their necessary food and medicine? I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a crystal ball.”

To provide temporary relief to transit agencies across Virginia, last week Jennifer Mitchell—the Director of the state’s Department of Rail and Public Transit (DRPT)—in tandem with the Commonwealth Transportation Board released $11 million in extra funding to support their operations.

“What we’re seeing right now is many systems across Virginia are moving to reduced service, but transit is still very vital to moving first responders, healthcare workers, and essential personnel, so we decided to provide $11 million in assistance to transit systems across the Commonwealth to help offset the revenue losses and provide funding for enhanced cleaning and other emergency items they’ve had to procure,” said Mitchell. “The $11 million sum is equivalent to about 1 month of operating revenues. We were able to use funds that have been deobligated from projects that have already been completed or are no longer moving forward for some reason.”

The additional $1.17 million GRTC will receive through this infusion could prove a lifeline. As the Congress debates billions of dollars in bailouts for banks and multinational corporations—many of whom pay no federal taxes, there is a growing movement pushing lawmakers to save transit across America. Leading the charge, Beth Osborne of Transportation for America organized a petition demanding additional funding for transit to stave off an “economic apocalypse.”

Without federal action to provide stopgap funding to America’s transit agencies, the fate of public transportation networks across the country will remain uncertain. According to Mitchell, Governor Northam’s administration is monitoring the situation closely and is ready to assist where possible. “Transit is really critical to our response to this virus, and it’s important that we keep it running for those people who need it. We’re going to continue supporting the systems as much as we can,” she said.

Until more clarity (and funding) is provided at the federal or state level, Timm and other transit agency heads across Virginia will have to keep all options on the table to respond to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on their operations. “We at GRTC want to make sure that we are overprepared—reasonably and foreseeably overprepared,” she said. “The challenge isn’t knowing what to do; the challenge is knowing when to do it.”

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Tagged: buses, coronavirus, grtc, richmond, transit, virginia

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.