Many metropolitan commuters across the United States rely on public transportation in order to get to and from their jobs. In fact, access to public transportation as well as commute length are often deciding factors in terms of accepting a new position. Nearly 14% of Americans have changed jobs in order to shorten their commutes.Now, some Rochesterians may find themselves unable to get to their jobs at all.
According to RTS CEO Bill Carpenter, a shortage of bus drivers is the cause. As a result of unusually high rates of illness and absences — most likely due to a harsher than normal winter — in addition to more retirements than usual, RTS is short almost 20 bus drivers, he said.
Over the next few weeks, he said weekday trips on 23 different bus routes may be affected between 5:30 a.m. and 7:50 a.m.
“We need a couple hundred operators each morning and the last couple of weeks we’ve been short one or two operators,” Carpenter said. “We had one day we were short 11 operators and that translates to people not getting to work, not getting to where they need to be, so we want to let folks know, until we’ve got the operator training class that’s finishing up in the next couple of weeks, we may have this problem intermittedly [sic].”
The Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents the RTS bus drivers, released a statement in regards to the shortage.
“ATU Local 282 has met with RGRTA management to address our concerns with the manpower shortages and we have been assured by RGRTA that they will aggressively address the manpower shortage. ATU will be monitoring the situation.”
It also went on to state that several ATU members have been working overtime in order to help with the manpower shortages, and plan to continue doing so until the situation is resolved.
In the meantime, daily alerts are posted on the RTS website between 5:15 a.m. and 8 a.m. each day.
“We’ll provide the routes so customers can know about it,” Carpenter said. “We’re still running 99 percent of our service and we want customers to know we want to be 100 percent reliable. When we’re back to 100 percent, we communicate that back to them as well.”
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