Transit Agencies Are Working Hard to Tackle the Challenge
By Jacob Herson
Managing Editor
Transit California
“Before the pandemic, there weren’t enough bus drivers to drive the routes that we have unless the majority of us work a whole lot of overtime,” said Sultana Adams of AC Transit, quoted in a CalMatters article in January 2022. “We were already short. Imagine what it’s like now.”
Part of the pre-pandemic challenge for the industry is an operator workforce with an average age in the fifties. The pandemic then brought about the “Great Resignation.” The Washington Post reported last December, “Transit officials across the country described the issue as twofold: On one hand, there is now fierce competition for workers with commercial driver’s licenses, the standard needed to drive buses in most municipalities in the country, as agencies compete with delivery services like FedEx, UPS and Amazon for workers. And on the other hand, attrition rates have skyrocketed, as burned-out transit workers have left for other jobs or early retirements.”
The burnout comes from long hours, the daily fear of contracting COVID-19, and enduring a gauntlet of riders frustrated by service reductions, and health and safety measures.
While the pandemic seemed to be easing, the transit industry was hit hard by the Omicron variant surge. The San Francisco Chronicle reported: “460 SFMTA employees have tested positive for the virus since the start of January, far surpassing the 325 positive cases the agency’s workforce had in 2021. The rise in positive cases, combined with staff quarantining due to possible exposure and regular sick calls, has resulted in Muni reducing service by about 20%-25% in recent weeks.” 
As CalMatters explained, “The labor shortage is part of a nationwide trend and isn’t limited to transit workers. But because transit systems are arteries that get employees to work—especially lower-income workers—the impact is reverberating throughout the California economy.”
Michael Pimentel, Executive Director of the California Transit Association, said: “The people who are hit hardest are low-income—specifically, low-income people of color—who often work in essential roles and who often lack other travel options. For these Californians, transit’s labor shortages present new challenges to fulfilling basic needs, like getting to work and school, making doctor’s appointments, and picking up groceries.”
Across the state, transit agencies are working hard to address this existential challenge to their service provision. For its part, the Association is calling new attention to this challenge and working to identify policy mechanisms that can support the transit industry in rebuilding its workforce.
“This is a huge pain point for us,” said Kate Breen, Director of Government Affairs, for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), and former Chair of the California Transit Association. “Consistent with national and regional hiring trends, COVID-19 directly impacted SFMTA’s hiring effort. We were not able to hire operators due to the pandemic. We restarted operator hiring in June 2020, after an 18-month hiring hiatus due to the pandemic. We were aiming to hire and train approximately 280 operators by the end of 2021, but have struggled to find candidates who meet our minimum qualifications. Our staffing shortages are further compounded by high employee leave usage, which strains our ability to meet service demand, compelling us to rely on overtime, and exhausts our extra board capacity.”
Christy Wegener, Director of Planning for the San Mateo County Transit District (SamTrans) said, “Operator shortage is something we’ve been facing for years, and it’s never a fun place to be in. Not only does it force difficult choices, but more importantly, when service doesn’t run, lives are impacted. In some ways, it seems that the pandemic worsened the operator shortage and we are having a harder time keeping existing operators and attracting new ones. But we can’t keep our head in the sand. Reimagine SamTrans, a comprehensive study of our bus network that launched in 2019 and concludes in 2022, is a visionary plan that assumes a growth in bus service—and accordingly, a growth in our workforce. The harsh reality is that current workforce levels aren’t even enough to support pre-COVID-19 levels of bus service, let alone an expanded service plan. What this means is that unless we start to move the needle on our workforce numbers, it will take longer to deliver the bus service levels that this County needs and our riders deserve.”
Larger issues underpin the challenge, some of which lie outside of transit agencies’ direct control.
Wegener said, “I think we have lots of challenges in front of us—some are unique to SamTrans; some are not. What’s unique to us, perhaps, is the Peninsula’s very high cost of living: While we do have a lot of operators who live in San Mateo County, we also have many who have long commutes. Driving an hour to work, just to drive a bus for another 6-8 hours, only to drive another hour home can make work-life balance challenging—something that is increasingly important to happy and productive employees."
“What’s not unique to SamTrans: How do we attract a younger generation to this type of work when we are competing with gig work, flexible schedules, working when you want, and not having to interface with the public? Being a public bus operator comes with a set schedule but variability of hours within the week. The newest employees have the least seniority and usually have the least attractive bus runs to operate. Until seniority is achieved, bus operators have less control over their days off each week or their annual vacation schedule. Also not unique to us—the pandemic’s impacts on the appeal of a job that requires interaction with the public remains unknown, but should definitely not be ruled out.”
The seeming intractability of the issue is not for lack of trying on the part of agencies. People are working hard to come up with solutions.
“Although COVID-19 has created a lot of issues that are outside of our control, we have come up with some solutions in an effort to address the situation,” said Breen of SFMTA. “We are making changes to our hiring process to try to reduce the time to hire. We are working on additional marketing strategies and hiring incentives to entice candidates. We are also working with San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development through a program called City Drive that assists in providing job preparedness training to citizens. As part of that training, they also help potential operator candidates to prepare for their commercial driver’s license test. 
“SamTrans is tackling this head on,” said Wegener. “We are thinking about compensation and how our compensation and benefits package compares regionally both at public agencies as well as private businesses. We are looking at our training program and modifying it so we have smaller training classes with more 1:1 interaction with trainers and SamTrans staff. We are trying to recruit locally and have engaged in partnerships with two local job centers for two recruiting events: NOVAworks Job Center and the East Palo Alto Career Center. Importantly—we just recently adopted a new contract with an 11% pay raise for our operators over the next three years. Our team isn’t sitting still—we are actively working on this because our ability to be an effective mobility provider depends on it.”
As SamTrans and other agencies recognize, competitive compensation remains critical to attracting and retaining an essential workforce, especially in California regions with some of the highest costs of living in the country, with the private sector offering other options, and as the pandemic continues.
“I think there’s a lot we could do as an industry to promote what’s great about being a transit operator,” said Breen. “An industry public service campaign that featured our diverse and talented group of transit operators is just one example of an effort that could help all of us.”
As the legislative session gets underway, the Association is preparing to address the operator shortage through its advocacy platform.
"As a society, we have spent countless hours discussing the workforce challenges in health care, education, and goods movement that were exacerbated by the pandemic. Unfortunately, while transit workers were similarly on frontlines, and are key to providing an essential service, our workforce challenges have gotten less attention,” said Pimentel. “We aim to make the workforce challenges faced by the transit industry a co-equal consideration for legislative and administrative intervention.”
Through a subgroup of the Association’s Operations Committee, members have worked with Association staff to identify proposed solutions for addressing bureaucratic hurdles to the hiring and retention of transit workers. In early March, the Association will submit a new letter to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that outlines these proposed solutions and that will help continue discussions that began late last year with the Newsom Administration on how the state can further support the transit industry in meeting its workforce needs.