Wednesday, Jan. 25 2012 10:56AM
City, KCATA addressing bus concerns
By T.R. Hanrahan
thanrahan@lsjournal.com
T.R. Hanrahan/The Journal
The schedule of Metro Route 152 changed as of Jan. The route provides service to and from downtown Kansas City. 1/23/2012 T.R. Hanrahan
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closeChanges to the bus route getting Lee’s Summit residents to and from downtown Kansas City aren’t sitting well with some.
During the Jan. 5 regular meeting of the Lee’s Summit City Council, several citizens expressed frustration with a new schedule for Route 152 by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. The route begins at a park-and-ride lot at U.S. 350 Highway and Chipman Road and makes one stop in Raytown and three stops at downtown locations.
Lee’s Summit Deputy City Manager Brian Scott said the city is starting to explore possible solutions with the KCATA.
“One of the options is for those few folks who do ride the bus in the morning is to maybe get a van for them,” he said. “The ATA would give them a passenger van and designate someone in that group to be the driver. Then they would charge everybody $10 or $15 a month to use that van.
“Another option is to go back to the original schedule that we had. I don’t know that that’s going to alleviate the issue of overcrowding. And another option might be to adjust the time schedule a little bit in another direction. Those are all things we are exploring (with the KCATA).”
Danny O’Connor, director of planning for the KCATA, said that in addition to working with Lee’s Summit officials, the input from riders and bus operators is important as well.
O’Connor said that adding additional buses to the rotation is unlikely in the near future.
“The service to Lee’s Summit is based on what they can afford,” he said, “and right now that is four buses.”
The primary complaints were that the new times were either too early to accommodate riders’ personal and work schedules or failed to get them to their destinations on time.
Those addressing the council said they understood there was a problem with overcrowding, but the changes did little to alleviate that concern and were instituted without adequate notice, leaving riders no time to make adjustments to their schedules or to make their dissatisfaction with the changes heard.
“For a while there, we had people literally standing in the aisles and kind of crowding around the stairwell there at the front of the bus,” O’Connor said. “It just wasn’t safe.
“What they’ve noticed – probably in the last year – in ridership is that that first bus in the morning is awfully light in terms of riders and the other three buses are a little heavy in terms of riders.”
O’Connor said that the published times on the schedule are somewhat misleading. In 2011, the first bus was scheduled to leave Lee’s Summit at 5:36 a.m. and reach its final stop at 6:29 a.m.
“We found that we were consistently beating that by about 10 minutes,” O’Connor said. “The logic for the change was to roll these back a bit and have the schedule better reflect reality.
“And so far our sampling indicates we are beating the current arrival times and ridership is better balanced.”
The new schedule has buses leaving every 30 minutes from 5:36 a.m. to 7:06 a.m., which is 20 minutes later than the 2011 schedule for the first bus and 10 minutes later for later ones.
“With the heavy rider loads on the later buses, the city (Lee’s Summit) asked us to look at modest schedule changes to better balance the rider loads and stay within their budget,” O’Connor said.
He noted that while the first bus is scheduled to arrive 13 minutes later in 2012, the later buses’ arrival times only have a three-minute differential.
Lee’s Summit city officials point out that they do not set the schedules, but they are consulted prior to changes.
“We rely on them,” Scott said. “They are the experts. They do this day in and day out.”
Scott said the new schedule was the result of complaints heard by both the city and the KCATA about the crowding. He said Lee’s Summit approached the KCATA for possible solutions and one suggestion they provided was to change the bus times. “So we said, ‘OK, let’s try that,’” he said. “The ATA did give notices. I think they tried to put them on the front of the buses so people would see (them). “Now was that timely notice? I don’t know.”
O’Connor said that changing the schedule is possible down the road, but that in order to reliably do so, KCATA would need at least three months of data.
Scott said the service began in 2001 with two buses, and as the city grew and gas prices began to climb, the number of riders went up as well.
The city added the fourth bus to the route two years ago, he said.
Although the citizens who addressed the council earlier this month said they were circulating petitions, Scott said his office hasn’t received any petitions or phone calls since then.
After offsets, Scott said, the service costs the city approximately $82,000 per year.
