Wednesday morning, Tom Maattala was sitting at the Dimond Transit Center, waiting to catch his second People Mover bus of the day to go to work. He had an unusually long commute.
“Today, they were 15 minutes late, 20 minutes late,” Maattala said. “So yeah, I missed a connection within 5 minutes.”
He said it’s inconvenient, but he wasn’t sweating it.
“I think a lot of the routes tend to be pretty good. But on occasion, maybe 5 or 10%, they’re either late or don’t show up,” Maattala said.
His estimate is pretty close to the official numbers from Jamie Acton, the director of Anchorage’s Public Transportation Department, which runs People Mover.
Her department apologized to its bus users on Tuesday for repeatedly canceling rides amid a driver shortage.
“We understand the frustration this causes for our patrons, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,” the People Mover newsletter said. “We want to assure you that this decision is not taken lightly.”
Acton has led the department for five years.
“This was the first time that we’ve really been in this situation where we find ourselves really struggling at this point to provide the service,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.
Acton said the driver pool and cancellations ebb and flow from day to day. Wednesday was an especially bad day, with about 9% of the scheduled bus trips canceled. She said the average lately has been around 5%.
Acton said there’s no one thing that suddenly changed. There’s regular turnover and retirements. There’s burnout, especially with drivers being asked to work a lot of overtime. And, last year, new rules took effect that established national minimum training requirements to get a commercial driver’s license, or CDL.
“So at this point, we saw cost increase, we saw more classroom time being required, and fewer providers being eligible to provide the training and the education that’s being required for the CDL,” she said. “So it is a little more cumbersome at this point to get your CDL.”
Lots of employers are hurting for these drivers in Alaska and nationally.
A shortage on the city’s road maintenance crews was partially to blame for how disruptive a series of December snowstorms were in Anchorage.
The Anchorage School District didn’t have enough bus drivers to consistently run its routes this past school year or the year before. Last year, it offered $2,500 retention bonuses to bus drivers. This year, it’s offering $1,000 bonuses.
People Mover does not offer bonuses.
“The school district is probably our biggest competition when it comes to trying to find qualified applicants,” Acton said.
District spokesperson M.J. Thim said in an email that 220 of the 227 drivers they need for the upcoming school year have committed to work, and about 15 more potential drivers are in the interview and training process.
“It’s very encouraging,” he said. “Fingers crossed that these numbers continue to hold and grow as we head into the week of July 31st.”
Anchorage’s Public Transportation Department is budgeted for 110 full-time drivers. Acton said 15 of those positions are vacant right now. More drivers are out on any given day for paid time off, family leave, medical leave and workers’ compensation leave.
The drivers who are working can pick up overtime to cover more trips. But they’re running into safety limits on maximum hours and mandatory rest.
So they have to cancel trips. Acton said the cancellations are targeted to the routes with the highest frequency. That way, a rider’s extra wait time for the next bus will be shorter than it would be on other routes.
Acton said relief is on the way. She said Wednesday that three new drivers are in the process of onboarding, and 15 more applicants are headed into the interview process.
Pay starts at $52,811 a year. She said it’s a rewarding job with full benefits and holidays.
“It’s a great job with the municipality,” she said. “I hear from my operators all the time that, you know, they love their passengers, that they love what they do, and they’re passionate about what they do. And so, you know, they serve a very vital role in our community of getting people to where they need to go and when they need to be there.”
In the meantime, riders can get announcements about service issues, like detours, delays and cancellations, through a new new smartphone app People Mover launched in March called mStop. It tracks buses in real time.
Rider Jeremy Stratton doesn’t use it. At a bus stop near Jewel Lake on Wednesday morning, he jingled a handful of change and waited for his overdue bus.
“I don’t know, maybe they’re running late? Maybe they’re not running today?” he wondered. “ I don’t think today’s a holiday, is it?”
It isn’t.
About 10 minutes past its scheduled time, his bus rounds the corner.
Jeremy Hsieh covers Anchorage with an emphasis on housing, homelessness, infrastructure and development. Reach him at jhsieh@alaskapublic.org or 907-550-8428. Read more about Jeremy here.
