Santa Rosa seeks to improve bus service

The Santa Rosa City Council signed off on an ongoing effort to revamp the city’s bus system to make service more efficient and speedier along major arteries in the city.

The council directed city staff to continue along a path that could result in a major redesign of city bus routes focusing less on reaching all areas of town and instead prioritizing a higher level of service along “transit corridors.”

“This concept has been in Santa Rosa for many years but we haven’t moved it forward,” said Rachel Ede, city transit planner.

The council’s blessing lets city staff take the approach to the next level and “really start to study what would it take to have high-quality, effective transit corridors in Santa Rosa that really start to compete … a little bit more with the automobile in terms of travel time,” Ede said.

“Reimagining CityBus” is a yearlong effort to combat a sharp drop in ridership in recent years brought on in part by fare increases and service reductions. But Ede made it clear that riders have had complaints about the system for a long time. “We’ve heard for years from our riders that they’re frustrated by routes that meander too much,” Ede said.

That’s partly because Santa Rosa’s bus system operates with the goal that 95 percent of areas with six or more housing units per acre should have a bus stop within a quarter-mile. That’s most of the city.

This has resulted in lots of routes that loop out into neighborhoods and back into downtown, with the result that multiple routes run along busy corridors like Mendocino and Santa Rosa avenues but with little coordination and without buses dedicated just to those corridors, Ede said.

The city’s traffic consultant on the project, Joey Goldman, said he has studied bus systems all over the country and found Santa Rosa’s one of the most complicated from a rider’s perspective. “This is a really, really, really difficult system to understand how to get from point A to point B,” Goldman said.

Resident Richard Canini said the system’s trip-planning tool is one of the problems. He claims it is flawed and sends people miles out of their way. “You’ve almost driven my wife and I to buy a car!” Canini said.

Councilman Gary Wysocky said he wanted to see new routes coordinate better with county and regional bus services, while Councilwoman Julie Combs said she wanted to make sure services to the disabled won’t suffer.

The redesign of routes could result in elimination of duplicative routes and installation of technology, such as signal prioritization, that could speed up bus service in some areas.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.