Metro Bus Availability Issues

Message from Justin Stuehrenberg
Metro Transit General Manager

As a rider myself, I know how frustrating it is when your bus doesn’t come. I understand the dissatisfaction of some members of our riding community due to recent issues with bus availability that have led to cancelled service on several routes.  My goal here is to explain what is happening now and what we are doing to address it.

The bottom line is that Metro is currently experiencing several issues affecting a portion of its fleet. These issues are not directly related to the recent launch of bus rapid transit or the earlier Metro redesign; rather they have to do with the buses themselves. We have previously had similar issues in late 2023 and in the spring of 2024. They are also temporary in nature, and we expect them to be largely resolved by the end of this month.  I’ve provided additional detail on these issues below.

To ensure more predictability, riders should assume that the individual trips listed in the service disruptions website will be cancelled each day through October.  

Service Disruptions Page

We have selected this list based on services that would result in a relatively short wait or other available routes that can be used. We will do our best to get these services back as soon as possible.

The Metro staff team is working tirelessly to ensure that we are holding our vendors accountable and meeting the community’s expectations. I realize that we have fallen short of that standard recently, and I want to assure you all that Metro management and our Teamster partners are taking this very seriously and are pushing to resolve this as quickly as possible. 

As Metro’s General Manager, and a bus rider, I sincerely apologize to all that have been impacted by this.

Thanks again for being a Metro rider, we value your ridership and your patience as we work through these challenges.

Please read on for more detail regarding the status of the Metro fleet.

60 foot buses

First, Metro has two separate fleets, and the issues are different for each one.  Our new fleet of longer electric buses operate on routes A, B, and F.  We currently have 61 of those buses and 38 of them are scheduled for service each day on Routes A, B, and F.  Prior to full-scale use of these buses, Metro followed guidance to break them in by putting roughly 1,000 miles on each one, which should have uncovered any defects in manufacturing.  While they did not show issues during that break-in period, there have subsequently been several issues that have shown up during regular service.  The primary issues we have are related to the door operation and the overhead charging system.

The door problems are related to their adjustment and calibration.  Each door is being re-checked and re-measured to ensure proper installation and adjustment.  However, that process takes approximately 4 hours per door, so it is taking significant time to get through the entire fleet.  The other primary issue is related to the overhead charging system. Again, there were no issues identified during the break-in period, but in subsequent service slight fluctuations in power delivery from the charger is, at times, overpowering what the bus can receive and causing a fault.  To address this, a new charging program is being implemented to reduce the charging power slightly in order to prevent those fluctuations from exceeding the bus limit.  These buses are fully under warranty and the manufacturer, New Flyer, is on site making these repairs at no cost to Metro.

This is manifesting in service in two ways.  Some buses on all three routes have had failures in the field, requiring that we pull the bus from service and move passengers to another bus.  In other cases, we do not have enough buses to pull out of the garage.  This generally results in some missed trips on Route B in late morning hours.  Route B does not have on-route charging, so the buses come back to the garage to be swapped out for a freshly charged bus. However, if there are no more buses available, that bus needs to wait at the facility and charge before it can return to service.  We’ve been able to alternate trips missed so that passengers should not be waiting more than an extra 15 minutes, but it’s still an inconvenience.

As of this writing, we currently have 35 out of the 61 buses in active service, which is 3 short of what we need just for routes A, B, and F.  At this time last week, we only had 30 available, so progress is being made. New Flyer has a large team of people here quickly working through these issues. Once they have updated the charging program and have inspected all the doors, we expect to see these issues reduce. We expect them to complete the charger programming by Oct 11 and complete the door calibrations by Nov 1.

Note that the 60 ft. buses are also intended serve other routes, including up to 13 buses daily on routes 80 and 75, but we cannot deploy them until New Flyer is able to return sufficient buses to service.

40 foot buses

We currently have 101 buses scheduled daily on routes other than A, B, and F.  Metro’s plan included 13 of those to be 60 ft. buses and the remaining 88 to be our traditional diesel fleet.  However, because of the shortage in the 60 ft. buses, we have needed to keep more of the diesel buses in service than we had planned for.

Our staff is rapidly trying to keep extra buses on the road as they experience normal daily mechanical issues – but mechanic availability is limiting our ability to completely overcome the deficit.  That availability is limited by multiple factors.  First, many of our mechanics were in detailed training on the new bus fleet in the second and third weeks of September.  While that training was necessary, it meant that the buses were not being worked on during that time, growing the backlog of buses in need of repair. Second, similar to other industries, we have struggled to recruit enough mechanics.

Out of our 49 budgeted positions, 5 are currently vacant and another 3 are in training. These trainees are roughly one week from being able to work independently, which will help significantly. As soon as they complete training, we will hire another group of trainees to keep the pipeline flowing.

In all, with completion of the electric bus training, we are seeing our backlog reduce over the past few weeks. We currently have 142 of these buses in our fleet and require 101 for full service each day with the 60 ft. shortage.  

Two weeks ago, we had roughly 89 available, last week it was roughly 92, and as of this writing we have 97 available.  While still short of our needed 101, we are making good progress and expect to be back to the needed level by the end of October.

The service impacts of this shortage are causing us to miss some trips in the morning and afternoon peak hours. While no service cancellation is easy, our attempt in creating this list was to make sure that people’s travel could be accommodated by other routes or with a delay to the next trip. 

Service Disruption Page