SANTA CRUZ >> Late last year, as most Santa Cruz County residents were taking a break from work to celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year, Santa Cruz Metro CEO Corey Aldridge was busy drafting an apology letter.

He was doing so because it became clear to him that the agency he had been leading for about eight months was unable to launch the last 10% of a major route network improvement plan that it had been promising for years and rolling out piece by piece since late 2023.

Aldridge, reiterating points he first publicly made during a Dec. 20 Metro board meeting, told the Sentinel this week that the final — but critical — slice of service enhancements were pushed to a later date, primarily because the 104-bus fleet powering the change was faltering.

“We have an aging fleet that, as its miles increase, more mileage is being put on for service — increased mileage, increased time on the road. So we’re seeing an increased need of preventative maintenance, repairs and our ability to have a fleet available has gone down,” said Aldridge. “With that we saw this need to hold service where we were at so that we could meet the demands, rather than trying to put out this additional service and cancel routes on a daily basis based on vehicle availability.”

Trust the process

The long-promised service upgrades were part of Reimagine Metro, the agency’s first comprehensive examination of its network in nearly a decade. The first phase of changes, implemented in December 2023, were only a redrawing of the network to create more efficiency based on 15 months of public outreach. Phase 2 began last spring and included a slow build of service increases and expansion, including four routes that cycled every 15 minutes or faster — a frequency the county didn’t have at all before the reimagining process.

“Hidden in that was the toll that the increased service would take on our vehicles,” said Santa Cruz Metro Chief Planning and Innovation Officer John Urgo. “We didn’t need more buses, we just needed those buses to drive more miles.”

So far, according to Urgo, the changes have created real community benefit. The Phase 1 updates alone, which included no service increases, resulted in a 26% ridership surge through the first three months of last year, according to Urgo. The Phase 2 upgrades, launched in the spring, resulted in a 6% ridership increase in April through June, compared to the same period in 2023, he added.

And while Metro has been able to meet its goals of hiring more drivers, the buses themselves simply didn’t have enough juice to meet the demand. The useful life of a typical Metro bus is 15 years, but approximately half of Santa Cruz Metro’s fleet have aged past that crucial point. At least two buses have logged more than 1 million miles, according to Aldridge — a distance greater than two trips to the moon and back.

Metro typically operates 99.5% of the service it plans, but as more buses were getting sent to the garage for repair, that figure dropped to around 96.5% in December, causing leadership to question if they could continue the service changes without delay.

Public apology

Mike Rotkin, who has cumulatively served 36 years on the Santa Cruz Metro board through various city and county roles, said he was caught blindsided by the Dec. 20 announcement from Aldridge and felt riders were not alerted with enough haste given the impact, or lack thereof, from the delayed service changes.

“If what you’re trying to do is win over choice riders, have people decide, ‘No, this is dependable enough that I’m not going to buy a new car,’” said Rotkin. “People have to have confidence that when you say you’re going to do ‘x’ that ‘x’ is going to happen.”

Rotkin said he wished the notice had been put out sooner and that the apology letter had been displayed more prominently. But he also confessed the board itself was at fault too.

“We are the board. We should be on top of this kind of stuff and we weren’t,” said Rotkin.

By Rotkin’s count, roughly 10 members of the public showed up to the Dec. 20 meeting to express their own frustration with the delay. One regular rider said he and others started to notice telltale signs that the fleet was not up to the job when buses were being substituted in and out of high-volume routes and some trips were getting dropped.

“We pieced together what was going on pretty early that there were … availability issues,” the rider said. “How could we figure this out months ago, but in Metro’s internal discussions … this was not addressed?”

Aldridge said the increase in canceled routes wasn’t born out in the data until December, but he was still quick to offer up a mea culpa, saying the decision was made too last minute.

“I felt, at the time, that this was what we needed to do for our organization,” said Aldridge. “It affected the public, it affected our employees, it affected a lot of things … we should have been better about communicating this far and wide.”

Hydrogen cavalry

Given the agency’s lack of comprehensive service upgrades in recent years, Aldridge said his team is already developing new standard operating procedures for major route adjustments. These modifications will put an emphasis on increased awareness and feedback from all Metro departments. Rotkin also suggested that the board should receive more detailed ridership data trends, similar to what it receives for specialized services such as Lift Line, but for all customers.

Another factor that caused Metro to rely on rapidly aging buses was a decision by the Metro board in 2023 spend about $87.4 million, most of which were state and federal grants, to purchase 57 hydrogen-powered, fuel cell electric buses for its fleet. While that total has decreased to 53 in the face of rising costs, the new buses have finally started to trickle in, according to Aldridge, who said the cutting-edge technology will hit local roadways sometime in late spring or early summer.

This will help the agency launch the last leg of service improvements, tentatively, by September, he said.

“We want to make sure we have everything ready to go, that we can definitely meet the demands to the fleet,” said Aldridge. “We’re eager to push that service out, but we just don’t want to overextend ourselves and overpromise what we can deliver to the public.”