Better Bus Network’s acclaimed additions cut back

Plans for a heralded Better Bus Network expansion OK’d in 2021 but never enacted are being scaled back because Miami-Dade can’t find enough bus drivers.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is asking for a slimmed-down upgrade to begin in November without every planned gain and not spending the extra $27.5 million that is approved.

If the county ever finds the needed 100 drivers to run the full plan, she said, it can be restored.

The expansion was initially to roll early in 2022, improving service across the board and adding routes. Initiated as a grassroots redesign by the private Transit Alliance in 2018 and after gathering data for three years, wrenching changes were planned to the bus system, including rebuilding all 99 routes from scratch.

“The heart and soul of the county’s public transportation system is its bus network,” Commissioner Eileen Higgins said in 2021 about the redesign.

But instead of expansion in a Better Bus Network, the pandemic saw the driver workforce shrink. As a result, 5% of the pre-covid service remains suspended, including 10 full routes, Mayor Levine Cava says in a memo for this week’s Transportation, Mobility and Planning Committee meeting.

Her change in the plan that commissioners approved in 2021 would make some of the suspensions permanent and cut other service “based on changes in passenger demand observed since the pandemic.” Those would eliminate Route 47 in Hialeah and Route 112 in Kendall.

Those cuts would trim service hours in the original plan by 6% “affecting only approximately 2% of the existing 175,000 daily passengers,” the mayor wrote.

Making those changes requires a commission hearing, the mayor wrote. “Once the department increases operator numbers, service needs will be re-evaluated and service may be resumed.”

Even with those cuts, she wrote, service will improve if the slimmed-down Better Bus Network starts in November.

“At midday on a weekday, access [to jobs and services] countywide increases by more than 30% with a 60-minute travel time” under that new model, she wrote. Currently, she added, 20% of people in poverty can access high-frequency bus routes within a half hour of home, which would rise to 40% under the new network.

The Better Bus Network was hotly debated in 2021 because it was to transform the network from one that, as the mayor wrote, “provides a basic service to every corner of the county” to a service that is more reliable and frequent for more potential riders but literally cuts out corners that had fewer users.

Even without commission approval, bus service will change in July, offering more frequent trips to Key Biscayne, Northwest 62nd Street and the South Dade Transitway, because those changes don’t need more drivers.

The county has struggled to find enough drivers to run existing services, let alone add 100 more. In April 2022, Miami Today reported 123 vacant full-time bus driver jobs, 7.6% of the total, and by August the department was losing 17 to 19 drivers monthly.

“We need to figure out ways to increase the number of folks that come in to compensate for the number of people leaving our ranks,” transit chief Eulois Cleckley told Miami Today in August.

What the mayor called “robust and creative recruitment campaigns” included signing bonuses, and a test once required for the job was ended. Transit officials went to job fairs countywide, netting applicants from across the nation.