Kitsap Transit continues to face an employee shortage crisis headed into 2023 as ridership has increased while a large number of bus drivers have left.
Coming out of COVID, much of the focus remained on increasing ridership to pre-pandemic levels. The decrease of health mandates, along with the introduction of a free youth ridership program, helped in the push for a more welcoming environment for public transportation.
Executive director John Clauson reported at the first KT meeting of the new year that the board had initially shot for a 5% increase, but reports indicated a number at least five times above that. “We don’t have all of the December numbers yet,” he said, “but at least through November, we actually increased by just over 25%, which was pretty significant, and we’re excited about that.”
The good news did not last long, however, as the focus shifted to new hires. While KT hired 62 new bus operators and 107 new employees in 2022, Clauson said that they also lost 53 operators; 38% were attributed to retirement, while the rest were not disclosed.
Clauson reported that a number of new hires were unable to complete the training and probation period, as well as a segment of new drivers who completed the steps but left for a variety of reasons. “It was a bit frustrating,” he said. “We did have a bit of a gain in the number of operators, but not nearly to the level that we had initially hoped.”
Low staffing affected other goals last year, including attempts to increase service and eventually resume the long absent Sunday service. KT reported just a 3.16% increase in the hours of bus service, though Clauson mentioned he was happy just to have it be a positive number.
The news was disappointing to the chair of the board, Poulsbo Mayor Becky Erickson, who continued her advocacy for bringing back Sunday service. It is something the board can no longer put off, she said.
“I’m not advocating for the Sunday service on all of our fixed routes,” she said. “I think we really need to explore Sunday service with the dial-a-ride concept because the ridership wasn’t robust anyway on Sundays, even before when we had it, but at least we had something.”
The troubles also followed KT into their future ferry ambitions. The agency reported slow goings in the continued work on a new all-electric passenger ferry model, which once again was partially attributed to staffing shortages. “We had anticipated being able to hire additional capital staff sooner than we were able to bring them on,” Clauson said. “Also, in the case of the ferry, we had an issue with the consultant’s availability to get moving on the project.”
Bremerton Mayor Greg Wheeler said moving into an unsure economic time it would be beneficial to start figuring out the most effective way to use taxpayer dollars. He highlighted Sunday service as one potential way of doing that. “I would support anything like that that analyzes the business model,” he said, “and, of course, Sunday service would be a direct benefit, possibly even be a way of gathering some data.”
