Transit in Transition

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority’s ridership dropped 80 percent, forcing the authority to lay off forty-two workers—15 percent of its workforce—in 2020. Amtrak had it even worse: Nationally it lost 95 percent of its riders.

Matt Carpenter, CEO of TheRide, was unsure where the bus service would bottom out. “We had orders not to travel unless you had to,” he recalls. “Nobody knew exactly where the bottom would be, but almost overnight, our demand for traveling disappeared.”

After a record 6.3 million passenger boardings during its 2019 fiscal year (Oct. 2018–Sept. 2019), TheRide dropped to 1.7 million during the pandemic-plagued year that followed. That’s consistent with statewide trends: According to Jean Ruestman, who heads the Office of Passenger Transportation at the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), public bus ridership statewide dropped from 87.1 million to 30.7 million in the same period.

According to TheRide.org, at its lowest point the lost ridership cost the authority $600,000 per month. But it could have been much worse: Fares provide only 15 percent of its revenue, with the rest coming from local, state, and federal subsidies.

It’s since made up most of the lost ground. With more than 1 million fixed-route riders from April to June of this year, ridership was up almost one-third over a year earlier. That put it “back to around 75 percent of our pre-pandemic levels,” Carpenter says, and he expects to hit 80 percent by the end of their fiscal year in September.

Long term, TheRide is focused on an ambitious project titled “TheRide 2045” that it hopes will transform transit in the Ann Arbor–Ypsilanti area. Carpenter emails that “Our final report for the Long-Range Plan projected an increase of ridership between 150–165 percent by 2045.” 

They’re banking on a new Ypsilanti bus terminal and more frequent service to draw more riders. “It’s going to be a better experience,” Carpenter says. “The amount of space we can have for buses will grow and increase service in the future.”

According to 2019 data cited in the 2021 Ann Arbor Moving Together Toward Vision Zero plan, walking, biking, and transit accounted for 36 percent of all trips that year: 16 percent walked, 11 percent biked, and 9 percent took transit. Yet the city’s A²Zero carbon-neutrality plan calls for “Residents [to] take transit for 40% of their journeys not done through walking and biking” by 2030. 

If the number of trips stays the same, AAATA’s ridership would have to more than triple to reach that goal. That’s not too far over TheRide’s target—but the transit authority doesn’t expect to hit it until 2045.

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TheRide recently announced a key development in its plan to increase ridership: a $7 million federal grant that will help pay for the new Ypsilanti Transit Center. The funding was requested and supported by congresswoman Debbie Dingell. Plans call for demolishing the current Pearl St. center in downtown Ypsi to build a bigger terminal that will support expanded services. 

“The number of bus bays restricts how much bus service we can bring into there at one time,” Carpenter explains. “By having more bus bays, we can later increase the frequency of service. And that’s going to help drive [increased] ridership.” 

According to TheRide.org, planning and design for the $18–$20 million project are scheduled to begin this year and extend through 2025. Construction will begin in 2026 and will last at least one year.

Better infrastructure and more frequent service should increase ridership, though just how much remains to be seen. And Ann Arbor city councilmember Dharma Akmon thinks the gap between the city and the transit authority plans is smaller than it seems.

Transit ridership may not need to rise so rapidly, Akmon emails, if people take fewer trips. “You need to know the denominator (i.e. total journeys to work) in order to say something meaningful about the goals.”

A²Zero calls for a 50 percent reduction in personal vehicle trips by 2030, and already, Akmon emails, “People are traveling to work less in Ann Arbor overall … Furthermore, it would probably be useful to account for telecommuting as a mode, considering the massive shift to hybrid work. As a example, if I work 5 days a week and pre-pandemic I took the bus all 5 days, but now I work from home 2 of the days and still take the bus the other 3 days, the transit ridership is down, but the fraction of my work trips using transit is still 100%.”

That’s true, but the goal still seems optimistic: The city’s biggest employers are the U-M and Michigan Medicine, and neither education or health care lends itself to remote work.  

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It’s not just local trips that A²Zero is targeting: It’s counting on the creation of a high-capacity transit system that connects Ann Arbor with nearby jurisdictions such as Detroit, Ypsilanti, Chelsea, and Brighton. By 2030, A²Zero envisions 25 percent of commuter trips into and out of Ann Arbor being taken on regional transit services.

The existing Amtrak regional rail service was also hit hard by the pandemic: “There was a time in the first sixty days … when our ridership was down to around 5 percent of normal—or if you prefer, down 95 percent,” says senior public relations manager Marc Magliari. But it’s now back to about 85 percent of its pre-Covid numbers.

“I started talking about rail when I ran for office the first time,” says former mayor John Hieftje (2000–2014). Making the case for a new train station in 2013, Hieftje told the Observer that Amtrak expected ridership to double in the next ten years.

According to Magliari, the actual increase since 2011 is a bit less than 50 percent. But the city also is banking on a revival of commuter rail—last seen here in 1984, when Amtrak canceled its “Michigan Executive” between Jackson and Detroit.

It almost happened in 2016: Washtenaw voters supported a Regional Transit Authority millage that would have paid for both commuter trains and bus rapid transit lines, but the tax narrowly failed in the four-county RTA area.

Hopes for a new station were stymied when Hieftje’s successor, Christopher Taylor, and his allies temporarily lost control of city council. The effort resumed when the balance of power shifted again, only to be given up for dead in 2021, when the Federal Railroad Administration canceled its environmental review of a multimodal station and parking structure on a parking lot at Fuller Park by the U-M medical center. The FRA cited the station’s estimated cost of more than $170 million, most of it driven by plans to include more than 1,300 parking spaces.

But this April, MLive reported that city transportation manager Raymond Hess is seeking a $1.5 million federal earmark to come up with a new plan—including a reassessment of the proposed site. “The City is actively engaging State, Federal, and other partners that may be able to contribute to this initiative,” Hess emails. “If funding is received, our team will manage the plan and project … While it’s premature to know the specifics, we would anticipate work will be needed on site selection, design, engineering, and public engagement.”

Since 2020, the RTA has run a pilot bus service, D2A2, between the Blake Transit Center in downtown Ann Arbor and Grand Circus Park in Detroit. Then-RTA chief operating officer Harmony Lloyd told WDET-FM in February that she was “thrilled” that it was carrying 4,000–5,000 riders a month on dozens of daily runs. But long-term funding depends on voters approving a regional millage—the RTA currently has no timeline for that.

Nonetheless, hope for intercity mass transit remains high. In a 2022 “infrastructure agenda,” city administrator Milton Dohoney included a $100 million line item for a new multimodal station. He noted that “Ann Arbor is the highest volume train station in the state of Michigan in terms of annual passengers boarding, and we anticipate that future demand will only increase. Anticipated additional train service between Chicago and Detroit, Ann Arbor and Traverse City, and the potential for commuter rail services will only push ridership up. A larger station, built with strong connections to existing multimodal transit services, will help meet the current and future ridership demands, help Ann Arbor reduce vehicle miles traveled in the region, and push the City closer to meeting its sustainability goals.” 

As with AAATA’s local network, just how much regional transit might increase, and when, remains to be seen. Intercity train and bus travel “ridership is increasing, but there’s a long way to go,” says MDOT’s Ruestman. “The question to ask is, will it ever recover to those prepandemic numbers?”

Transit systems are “trying to adjust to the new normal,” she says, including remote work, changing travel patterns, and people who relocated during the pandemic. “It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the future,” Ruestman says, “because no one knows for sure.”