Despite uncertain future funding, Kitsap Transit will launch Sunday bus service March 16 on Bainbridge Island.

One concern highlighted at the KT board’s March 4 meeting was the continuation of replacing diesel buses with electric ones. Amid funding uncertainty, KT doesn’t anticipate any short-term service impacts, said Sanjay Bhatt, KT marketing & public information director.

BI City Councilmember and KT board member Clarence Moriwaki described some of the implications of holding off on purchasing electric buses. “Kitsap Transit has a lot of great plans, but we’re not going to go out there and take a bid for buses and then find out eight months later that the funding has been pooled,” he said. “So it’s just being responsible.”

Moriwaki said for public transit to be successful it needs to be frequent, reliable, predictable and take people where they want to go. “When you have those kind of places, that’s where a lot of people want to get to. For whatever reason that’s where transit works, because it’s someplace that there’s a magnet for people,” he said.

In order to balance uncertain federal and state funding, KT has to wait to make certain investments like buying additional electric buses, Moriwaki said.

KT is planning to keep diesel buses operating and swapping them out for electric buses as funding allows, Bhatt says in an email.

Moriwaki said the delay can be frustrating as the agency doesn’t always have the ability to predict future costs. For example, how much new buses may cost in a year.

Regarding community input, Bhatt wrote that the top reasons why customers take public transit include: convenience; avoid traffic/parking; cost; and to support the environment. “The most frequently mentioned service improvement that Bainbridge customers ask for are later operating hours,” KT’s 2023 Origin & Destination Survey says.

BI is served by 12 bus routes with eight being inter-island, per the KT route map. In 2024, KT carried 193,876 passengers on BI.

“We have to create the predictability and reliability of a route and do it frequently enough it becomes a habit for people,” Moriwaki said.

To learn more about new route offerings, visit kitsaptransit.com/service/routed-buses/sunday-bus-service.