SAN ANTONIO – The head of VIA Metropolitan Transit says the agency has seen a jump in riders as they improve bus routes and cuts wait times.
Speaking at the State of Transit luncheon at the Boeing Center at Tech Port, Jon Gary Herrera told the crowd VIA has seen an increase of 2 million trips across its transit system so far, compared to the same time last year —most of that from its traditional, fixed-route bus services.
Though that still doesn’t put ridership above a historic high, Herrera confirmed to KSAT that it is the best it has been since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of the gains, he said, came from routes the transit agency has been improving over the past 18 months with improved route efficiency and increasing how often buses come along.
Last year, he said, 70% of the system had a frequency of more than 30 minutes. Now, 72% of the system is at 30 minutes or less.
“So that is the big contrast,” he told KSAT. “We call that flipping the script.”
He credited a push to hire drivers as one of the main factors in getting the time down.
“As soon as we brought them on, instead of waiting for all of them to be on, we started getting them out to the system and making improvements in the system,” Herrera said. “So we have done a tranche of about four different service changes that we call it in the system, which each one of those are powered by the additional operators that we’ve hired.”
At the VIA Brooks Transit Center, Robert Barnes told KSAT one of the routes he takes now partly overlaps with another, meaning more frequent buses. He estimated he saves about 30 to 45 minutes each way.
“Depending on where I’m going, if I have to catch multiple buses, it might take a little bit more of my time, but the majority of my routes that have changed, it’s a little bit quicker,” Barnes said.
Of course, not every rider is pleased with how every route performs.
Angel Rolon sat waiting for the next 32 line bus, about 23 minutes away according to his app.
“If the 32 would come on time when they say they’re supposed to come, then we would never have any problems,” he said.
Another rider, Joshua Clark, said he’d only been riding the bus for a short time while his car is in the repair shop.
“I think it’s pretty frequent. It’s pretty good,” he said. ”It gets me all around town, wherever I need to go pretty much.”
Herrera told KSAT the boost in rider numbers is only “chapter one” of a multi-chapter story.
“When we have the green line and the silver line coming on board, we’re gonna see an increase as well,” he said of VIA’s planned advanced rapid transit lines. “Our goal is to get to 50 million, and we want to get the 50 million within about seven years.”
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