Downtown Santa Rosa shuttle struggling with ridership

Bobby Aguirre stepped off a northbound SMART train in downtown Santa Rosa last week on the last leg of a long public transit journey.

Aguirre, 59, started his morning in Manteca, just south of Stockton, where he had been visiting family for the weekend. To get home to Santa Rosa, he rode an ACE train, a BART train, a bus over the Richmond Bridge, and then the SMART train from San Rafael, which arrived on time in Railroad Square.

So the weary traveler, who doesn’t drive, was grateful to have a free shuttle waiting to take him to the downtown transit mall to catch his final bus home in the Santa Rosa Junior College neighborhood.

“It’s convenient,” Aguirre said of the shuttle. “Otherwise it’d be kind of a long walk.”

Though the three-minute ride didn’t cost Aguirre anything, it cost the public plenty.

Taxpayers - or more precisely, anybody who parks downtown - paid $47 for Aguirre’s free ride.

The city’s free ParkSMART shuttle has been operating since December, part of Santa Rosa’s effort to support the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit system.

The goal was to make it easy for people to get from city parking garages on the east side of Highway 101 to the train station in Railroad Square, where there’s far less public parking.

But use of the shuttle, which runs in a near-continuous loop downtown five days a week, has been low. The 18-seat bus drives around empty or nearly empty all day. It averaged just 14 riders a day from March to June. That’s less than one rider for each of the 25 trips the bus made daily, between 4:20 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.

“Obviously, the service has not matured,” said Yuri Koslen, a city transit planner.

Koslen noted, however, that usage has increased nearly every month since the shuttle’s inception. In January, the first full month of service, there were 171 rides. By June that number increased to 358 rides, he said.

While the numbers are heading in the right direction, ridership remains “below expectations,” Koslen said.

It’s not just the ridership figures that are problematic, Koslen said. A more targeted Oakmont shuttle only carries 564 people on average a month. The bigger issue is the cost per ride, he said.

“From a planning standpoint, we want to look for a solution whose cost per rider is appropriate,” he said.

For a service that costs about $168,000 a year, that works out to $47.47 a ride, according to Santa Rosa CityBus, which operates the shuttle, though the downtown parking district picks up the tab.

All public transit is subsidized, but the per-ride cost for the shuttle is significantly higher than any other public transportation option in the city.

For example, Paratransit, which serves people with special needs, costs $31.39 a ride. The Oakmont shuttle costs $16.34 a ride. Regular CityBus fixed route buses, which have far higher ridership, cost $6.10 a ride.

By comparison, an Uber ride from the station to the transit mall starts at $5.50. A ride in a Central Cab will cost you about $7.

Mayor Chris Coursey noted that the service is not just for SMART riders. Anyone who wants to go to one of the six stops downtown can use the shuttle, he noted.

“I don’t think a lot of people know that shuttle exists,” Coursey said. “I think it has too low of a profile. Honestly, I wish it was a brighter color.”

It’s not clear whether a new paint job is in the works for the shuttle. The one-year contract with MV Transit is up in December, and the council will have the chance to tweak the service then.

City staff are mulling various options for the council, Koslen said. Changes could include adjusting the route frequency or location or number of stops, Koslen said.

It’s possible the shuttle is “a little bit duplicative” of some of the fixed bus lines in the city. It’s also possible that parking options around the station aren’t as anemic as initially feared, or that more people are willing to walk or bike to the train.

Coursey said he gets a little annoyed when people critique public transportation as highly subsidized while ignoring similar subsidies through the local, state and federal road network. If more people used it, the per-ride costs would drop quickly, he said.

“I wish people were aware of that shuttle and were using that shuttle, but no part of our transportation system is free,” Coursey said. “So let’s use what we’re paying for.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.