Anchorage’s city bus driver shortage brings cancellations and delays for riders

Anchorage residents who rely on the city’s People Mover buses will be contending with increased delays for the next couple months in the wake of an ongoing bus operator shortage.

Last week, 8.2% of all city bus rides in Anchorage were canceled due to low staffing, according to Jamie Acton, the director of Anchorage’s Public Transportation Department, which runs People Mover.

Acton said this week that the department has been experiencing staffing challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but the shortage worsened significantly in July due to a mix of retirements, career changes and moves out of state by longtime drivers.

The city put out a statement about the shortage in a July newsletter.

“Like most cities in the U.S., we are grappling with a significant challenge: a shortage of skilled and qualified CDL bus operators,” the statement said. “Despite our best efforts to recruit and train new bus operators, we continue to struggle to fill vacancies. As a result, we are forced daily to make difficult decisions, including canceling some trips, to ensure the continuity of service on our most critical routes.”

The shortage is mostly affecting the city’s “high frequency” routes, which typically run every 15 minutes, along major roads like DeBarr Road and Northern Lights Boulevard, Acton said. The cancellations are tacking on an additional 15 minutes for many of those routes.

The less-frequented routes, with buses that run every 30 minutes or more, have faced fewer disruptions from the operator shortage, Acton said: The department is “really trying to avoid cutting 30-minute service to 60 minutes as much as possible.”

The municipality needs to hire 12 drivers to be fully staffed for all routes, according to Acton. Although seven new drivers have been hired since last month, it will take around two months for the new hires to be fully onboarded and ready to hit the road, she said.

“And then I think we’ll start to see the needle move. And then hopefully out of this next pool of applicants, we’ll be able to grab 12 more, and that’s when I think we’ll really see that numbers decline in missed trips,” she said.

The city has ramped up hiring efforts for the bus operator positions, which pay a starting rate of a little over $52,000 a year, Acton said.

The Anchorage School District, which grappled with an even more severe driver shortage last fall, boosted its hourly pay from $21 to $25 and offered a hiring bonus to attract drivers. This month, the district said it had rebounded from its low staff count and anticipated being fully staffed heading into the new school year.

Acton said the municipality hadn’t yet instituted any kind of hiring bonuses or salary boosts for its drivers, but conversations at the municipality about these kinds of incentives were underway.

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Some passengers waiting for their buses on a recent morning described being inconvenienced by the shortage, while others, many of whom said they have been using the public transit system in Anchorage for years, said they‘d noticed few disruptions to their regular routes in recent weeks.

Davina and Vincent Goodlataw said they had been waiting in the rain at their East Anchorage stop for 45 minutes for their bus to Mountain View. They were frustrated by how long they’d been waiting. They said that the delays have been happening frequently since their recent move to Anchorage from Glennallen.

“We’ve been waiting a really long time,” Davina Goodlataw said.

A few blocks away, Jackie Mowl was also waiting for a bus to take her back to her Mountain View home, after a visit to the DMV to take her written driver’s test.

She said she hadn’t noticed significant delays recently. She spends a large portion of her days riding the bus. It’s usually not more than five or six minutes late, she said.

At the transit center in downtown Anchorage, Charles Berry was waiting with a cart full of groceries for the bus to his neighborhood, Government Hill.

He said he was aware of a bus driver shortage from signs posted by the transit agency, but he also hadn’t been stuck waiting too long for a bus in recent weeks.

Berry said he uses a smartphone app that People Mover launched in March, called mStop, which tracks buses in real time and displays announcements about service issues, like detours, delays and cancellations. He said it’s pretty helpful. The bus he was waiting for was supposed to arrive at 11:23 a.m. It pulled up right on time.

Berry said his worst bus-riding experience in recent memory occurred this winter, when many of the stops he frequents and the sidewalks nearby were left covered in small mountains of snow, making the whole experience treacherous, he said.

“There was the risk of getting run over,” he said.

Acton said that in addition to hearing from passengers who were dealing with the delays, she’d heard from bus drivers who were frustrated by the continued shortage, too.

“It is having an impact on our community, and I think that is unfortunate,” Acton said.