photo by: Mike Yoder

A Lawrence Transit System bus stops just south of Seventh and Vermont streets, Monday, Jan. 18, 2016.

After an expansion of the city’s bus service yielded limited ridership growth, city leaders are suggesting new strategies to fill the seats and combat the national downturn in public transit ridership.

In August 2016, the city of Lawrence extended two bus routes and doubled the frequency of three others. From 2016 to 2017, there was an approximately 1.4 percent increase in total ridership despite room for many more riders, according to ridership numbers the city provided to the Journal-World. The bus service has the capacity to add hundreds of thousands of trips annually, and city leaders say that getting more people to take the bus — especially amid drops in ridership across the U.S. — will take changes to routes as well as to the town itself.

Commissioner Matthew Herbert said the biggest thing the city can do to increase ridership is to improve route efficiency so riders get to their destinations faster. Herbert said how spread out the town is makes that challenging, but that as the population grows — the city has recently been adding about 1,000 residents per year — city leaders can work to change that. Rather than letting the city sprawl outward, Herbert said the city must increase density within its boundaries.

“On top of looking at options with a transit hub and route efficiencies, I think one of the things we have to look at is just really prioritizing infill development, so that we can try to concentrate commercial districts more effectively,” Herbert said. “And by doing that I think you lessen people’s travel time.”

To compensate for service increases, the City Commission recently approved an approximately $230,000 increase to its contract with MV Transportation, the company that operates the city’s bus system. A special citywide sales tax, which voters renewed for another 10 years in November, generates about $4 million per year for transit operations, helping the city to receive nearly that same amount annually from state and federal transportation grants.

Fighting downward national trends

If the national trends are any indication, the city will have more than local factors working against its efforts. Overall public transit ridership fell in 42 of the 50 biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S. last year, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data compiled by advocacy and research group TransitCenter.

Lawrence transit officials say the city is not immune to those trends, which are often attributed to factors such as low gas prices and the emergence of ride-hailing services such as Uber.

“We’ve continued to grow, so it hasn’t hit us as hard,” Nugent said. “And sometimes some communities respond to things like that in different ways, so maybe one community would lose ridership this year and it may take us two years to start seeing a loss in ridership. That we don’t know yet.”

Nugent said he sees lower gas prices, as well as more delivery services from websites such as Amazon, as part of the reason the city didn’t see a bigger ridership boost from the increase in bus service. Still, Nugent said Lawrence is lucky that its ridership continues to grow while other cities are seeing their numbers fall.

Some cities in the Midwest region are already seeing drops in transit ridership. Bus ridership in the Kansas City metropolitan area fell by about 600,000 riders last year, or by about 4 percent, according to the data. University communities similar in size to Lawrence, such as Columbia, Mo., and Iowa City, also saw significant drops in bus ridership.

Getting more nonstudent riders

The city coordinates its service with the University of Kansas bus service, and the vast majority of bus trips citywide derive from University of Kansas routes. Last year, KU riders made up 60 percent of the city’s total ridership. Specifically, there were about 3.1 million annual trips on the bus system, and KU riders made close to 2 million of those, according to the ridership numbers.

Nugent agreed with Herbert that improving the routes is key to increasing ridership. Route efficiency is one of the main considerations in the city’s location study for a transit hub, and Nugent said the City Commission is expected to make a determination regarding the hub this spring.

Apart from the routes themselves, Nugent said the city’s current strategy for increasing ridership over the long term is to introduce more young riders to the service. He said that’s part of the thinking behind the city’s expansion of the K-12 summer bus pass to a yearlong option. He said getting more people accustomed to riding the bus will play into the shift in habits that is ultimately needed.

“That’s part of trying to engage people and get them used to riding transit not just during the summer, but to go to school every day,” Nugent said. “And then maybe to go to Rock Chalk (Park) at night, to try make it more part of their everyday life.”

A cultural shift

For the long-term changes, the city has some time on its side.

Last year, Lawrence voters approved the renewal of the special transit sales tax, which will help fund the bus service until 2029. Though there are no official capacity numbers, Nugent said the city’s bus system could easily accommodate at least half a million more riders per year with its current resources.

Commissioner Jennifer Ananda said that to increase ridership citywide, the city needs to consider the issue from many different angles. Ananda said that not only do the routes themselves need to be more convenient, but that the layout of the community should better incorporate transit. She said instead of focusing on parking, new residential and commercial areas need to be planned with walkability and bus connections in mind, and perhaps even include pedestrian zones.

“Not only making it more convenient, but making public transportation the natural thing that you would do, so that you don’t have to do things like find parking,” Ananda said.

Like Nugent, Ananda and Herbert both said that increasing ridership will ultimately take a cultural shift. Ananda said perceptions need to change so that more people see buses as a transportation choice.

Herbert, who grew up in Lawrence, also said creating a bus service that’s not seen as a last resort is key to that shift.

“We have to work to remove the stigma of bus ridership,” Herbert said. “We have to make the bus something that people choose to do instead of being a mode of transportation that people take if they have no other option.”