Extensive article about the Public Transit System (TCAT) in Ithaca. From the Ithaca Times:
Ithaca Public Transportation: Popular, Award-winning, and Under-funded
Posted: Tuesday, November 26, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 1:43 pm, Wed Dec 4, 2013.
By Bill Chaisson
editor@ithacatimes.com |
In 2012 Tompkins County Area Transportation (TCAT) saw people take 4.13 million rides on a bus. That was a 4.7 percent increase over the 2011 number, but it was a 48 percent increase over a decade ago. This kind of ridership is comparable to that of a city of 200,000 or 300,000. Joe Turcotte, the general manager of TCAT, has got the numbers to prove it. He has gathered data from around the country, looking at dozens of systems from cities with and without universities.
In 2011 TCAT won an award from the American Public Transportation Association, which decided that the Tompkins County system was the best in the country with a ridership of under 4 million. “It was a great honor.,” said Turcotte. “When you think about, here were all these people who knew about transportation, and they decided that we were the best. ”
The TCAT fleet includes 54 buses and that isn’t enough. “We are knowingly leaving people at stops,” said Turcotte, “and we can’t do anything about it.” The system is funded via equal share contributions from Cornell University, the City of Ithaca, and Tompkins County. The capital contributions—what would be used to buy new buses, as opposed to paying for operations—are $100,000 each.
In order to keep the fleet up-to-date four buses should be replaced each year. According to Turcotte, an ordinary diesel bus costs $420,000 and replacing four of them costs $1.4 million. (Apparently there is a volume discount.) Recently, the county legislature passed a law that began putting a portion of the mortgage reporting tax into TCAT’s capital fund.
“This will give us $600,000 to $700,000 a year,” said Turcotte. “That’s a great start toward what we need.”
But the general manager has no idea where the rest of the money will come from. “We are trying to piece together money just to replace the fleet,” he said, “never mind doing anything else.”
On the operations side of the budget the university, city and town each contribute $830,000 per year. In addition, the university pays TCAT a dollar a ride each time a member of the Cornell community swipes their card at the pay kiosk at the front of the bus. This accumulates to approximately $2.5 million each year, and it is rising. According to Turcotte, the Cornell students and staff account for 70 percent of the total ridership.
Why is ridership growing? “That’s the question of the day at TCAT,” said Turcotte.
Fernando de Aragon, the executive director of the Tompkins County Transportation Council, can martial several criteria to explain why the system is so popular.
“Cornell employees and students apparently ride free,” he said. “Of course, that’s not true; the university pays, but it makes for easy on-easy off and it’s a tremendous service. Some kids jump on just to a couple of blocks.”
De Aragon noted that many students do not have vehicles and that furthermore the university population includes a large percentage of people from other cultures for whom riding public transportation is “just the way you get around.”
“We are lucky with our geography too,” said de Aragon. “The city is in the middle of the county and it’s the main employment center. It is an advantage to have a central hub. You still have to drive a lot because there is so much rural land, so you sacrifice some efficiency, but [because of Ithaca’s central location] it isn’t as bad as it could be.”
De Aragon also praised the TCAT staff for being so methodical in the analysis of the bus routes, which allows them to get the most out of the system within the limitations of their resources.
“I don’t have any data to substantiate this, but I think there are a number of other options, like car-sharing, that complement the bus system in the region,” said de Aragon. “As a tranportation planner you want to reduce the number of drive-alone trips and provide viable options. Car-share riders tend to use mass transit more often.”
The current state of our age demographics in the United States are also contributing to the growing popularity of mass transit in general. “Boomers are aging,” said de Aragon, “and they are outgrowing their cars. The Millennials—the children of the Baby Boom—are a big wave, not quite as big as the Baby Boom, but big. They are having a significant impact, and they have a different perspective because of their relationship with technology.”
“Eighteen to 20-year-olds are choosing not to buy vehicles,” said Turcotte. “That’s got to help increase ridership.” He noted that in 2009 TCAT expanded its use of “fare media,” the conversion of TC3, Ithaca College, city, and county employee plastic ID cards into fare cards.
“It’s more of a business arrangement,” he said. “There’s no fumbling for change.”
In true Ithaca spirit, TCAT used a local software company, John Guttridge’s Brightworks, to build the fare boxes—which include the swiping devices for the fare cards—at the front of their buses. Turcotte said this raised eyebrows when he described it at professional meetings; it is unusual for such a small system to develop something like this by themselves. It is much more common, even for larger systems, to buy it from a national manufacturer.
Like Turcotte, de Aragon was not sure why ridership was growing locally, but he speculated that it had something to do with the rising cost of transportation. “Cars,” he said, “are expensive.”
The analysis of the 2010 census has recently produced a study on use of transportation. De Aragon said that it clearly supports that there is growing dependence on alternatives to the automobile for the crucial journey to work. “Among lower income people and minorities in particular this is true,” he said. “It’s critical to maintain mass transit and other alternatives to help these folks keep their jobs.”
Dwight Mengel, now the chief transportation planner for Tompkins County, cited the bus service between Ithaca and Watkins Glen as an example of maintaining service with alternatives to buses. “About three years ago we dropped commuter bus service to Watkins Glen,” he said. “Schuyler County couldn’t receive the federal funding that was supporting it. It was a well used bus route.” TCAT set up a ride-share and van-pool program to replace the bus route. “It serves 50 percent of the ridership,” said Mengel. “I don’t know where the other riders are.”
Until 2005 the county, city, and university all had separate bus systems. Mengel has been working in county transportation here since the 1980s. According to Mengel, the county system was the last to form, dating from August 1982. Cornell’s system had its genesis in the 1960s when the peripheral parking was built and school buses brought people from A to B Lot. The city’s system dates back to the turn of 20th century, when it included trolleys.
“Consolidation began in 1989. First we built the facility [on Willow Avenue],” said Mengel. “The initiative came from Bill Went, the director of transportation and mail services at Cornell. Bernie Carpenter was the head of Ithaca Transit [the city system] at the time and I was at the county.” Went suggested using the transportation at Kent State University in Ohio as a model.
The dramatic kickstart to the coalescence came in the form of a 50-degree drop in temperature in a couple of hours during winter 1989. The diesel fuel in the university and county buses—which were stored outside—gelled. The city buses were stored inside, but the garage was at capacity.
Money to build the Willow Avenue garage came in the form of a Federal Transit Administration grant procured with the help of Sen. Alphonse D’Amato. “It swept together $3.2 million in federal funds,” said Mengel. “The project cost $6 million.” It opened in 1992.
Further consolidation occurred between 1992 and 1997, with the “Four Bs” leading the way—County Legislator Barbara Blanchard, city Public Works Commissioner Bill Gray, Cornell’s Bill Went, and Bill Mobbs, the county commissioner of public works. “It took two iterations to resolve,” said Mengel. “We brought in Rod Gehring from Michigan in 1998, organized a new management team and planned a consolidated system.” Mengel was the project manager for the effort to integrate all the services. They immediately saw a 10 percent rise in ridership, while trimming routes by 2 or 3 percent.
They entered a period of innovation, adding bike racks to the front of buses and instituting bus Route 10 (the most popular in the system with frequent service to Cornell). “These things were initially not supported by the existing management team,” said Mengel, “so I decided that we should have a new rule: ‘If we don’t like it, we should probably do it.’ And that’s what happened.”
In 2005 a non-profit was formed, Turcotte was hired as general manager, and all the administration was put under one roof; everyone became a TCAT employee. That our transportation system is run by a not-for-profit is a bit odd. According to Turcotte, around the United States, most are either extensions of a city or county government or run as for-profit enterprises. Many become a “transit authority,” a distinct classification with respect to a larger government body.
“It’s a bit of a challenge to run TCAT as a non-profit,” said the general manager. “New York State inspects the vehicles twice a year. That’s not a bad thing, but we have accommodate and prepare for it.” Turcotte explained that if TCAT was a transit authority it would become a single line in the state budget. “Right now we’re in what is called a ‘formula group,’ which a hundred plus entities competing for a pot of money.” Instead of being allocated money from the state, TCAT is reimbursed for what they have already spent. Turcotte isn’t sure if TCAT would actually receive more money from the state if it was a transit authority. “We’re just at the mercy of the state government at that point,” said Turcotte.
Mengel recalled that in 2004 the state legislature had to pass a special law to allow Cornell, a non-municipality, to run a transit system with the county and city. The TCAT board asked the state and county legislatures if they could create a transit authority and they were turned down flatly. “There were politics that were unrelated to anything in Tompkins County,” said Mengel, “that caused them to say no to the creation of any more authorities.”
According to Mengel, authorities can organize under the state Public Authorities Law and have a board appointed by the governor, or under the Public Transportation Law, and have a locally appointed board. Only Utica had done it the second way and there were questions as to its sustainability. The Tompkins County insistence that it was different from Utica went unheeded.
While Turcotte doesn’t see how TCAT could get more money from the state, the federal government doesn’t seem like an option either. “Population works against us at the federal level,” he said, “because population is the primary criterion. Broome County gets more money than we do, but they have declining ridership and will probably have to scale back service.” Broome County transportation receives twice as much money as TCAT.
In addition to searching for more funds, TCAT is always looking for ways to save money, ideally through innovation. In a fleet of 54, eight buses are diesel hybrids. Normal diesel buses get 3.5 miles per gallon (mpg); hybrids get 4.5 mpg but cost $620,000 and therefore take 30 years to pay for themselves.
Centro, the regional transit authority, has pursued natural gas-fueled buses. “You need a high-speed fueling station,” said Turcotte. “It’s a multi-million dollar capital investment up front. They did it years ago up there. We’d have to partner with other fleets to make it work.”
“We’ve been chosen to host a hydrogen fuel-cell bus,” Turcotte said. “The idea originated at Cornell. The researchers wanted to design a fueling station and they approached us in order to find a practical application. We’ll get a free bus out of it, if we like. Or we’ll send it back if we don’t. We aren’t afraid to push the envelope.”
The TCAT staff is still trying to find a place for the fueling station on the Willow Avenue campus, which is extremely crowded right now. “If someone decided to donate five buses to us right now,” Turcotte said, “we’d have nowhere to put them.”
According to the TCAT manager, diesel engines are “getting better” when it comes to emissions and have essentially reached zero particulate emissions through the use of urea filters. He has looked into biodiesel, but TCAT would have had to have the fuel trucked in and the cost was prohibitive. The TCAT bus fleet uses 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel per year.
Turcotte frequently hears the suggestion that TCAT should use smaller buses on some routes in order to save money. But he said that if you follow most of the big buses through their routes, they will all be full at some point.
At some future date, when the system is able to add routes and reach into more thinly populated portions of the county, then smaller vehicles may be deployed. “Right now we are looking for the technology for real-time dispatching in order to pick up people on demand,” said Turcotte. “We have to get creative with smaller vehicles. It would need to be collaborative, but we don’t have the money to do anything now.”
Right now TCAT hopes to increase the public’s awareness of how thinly its resources are stretched. Turcotte and his staff are well aware of what the Tompkins County community would like to get from their transportation system, but TCAT would like them to know until more funding is available service will be flat.
“We had a transportation plan done a few years ago,” said Turcotte. “We had 20 public hearings and asked people ‘How can we do better?’” Many people requested more midday service to the outlying towns, which TCAT can not provide because the demand is not sufficient. They were, however, able to institute a late-night service between Ithaca College and downtown, which Turcotte called a “staggering success.”
“More than ever people want public transportation,” said the head of TCAT, “but we can’t find the money.” He went down to Washington to attending a Congressional “listening session” leading up to the passage of the Federal Transportation Act this past spring. “I didn’t get the feeling that the chair of the committee [Rep. John Mica, R-Fla.] was that interested in giving money to public transportation. But the bill came out OK, considering.”
Here's the link:
http://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca-pu...a4bcf887a.html