This Bluesky post from AC Transit board member Jean Walsh caught my eye: I’ve always heard (and suspected) that AC Transit’s callout rates are high, but this post gives numbers—and they’re alarming.
Sorry to everyone trying to catch an AC Transit bus last night. Did you know we have an “unscheduled unavailability” rate of 23%? Almost 1/4 of the people scheduled to work don’t come in. —@therealjeanwalsh.bsky.social
With agency wide callout rates that hover around 23%, AC Transit is missing a quarter of its drivers on any given day, meaning a little under a quarter of trips will be dropped. For reference, Muni has only ever approached this level of operator unavailability during the Omicron surge in 2022, when COVID-19 positive and exposed drivers were forced to quarantine. Barring an act of god (used in the insurance-sense. ie a pandemic or natural disaster), operator unavailability should never be this high. Though it’s not a direct comparison, a certain large northeast transit agency cancels about 2% of subway trips due to crew unavailability.1
There are a number of exacerbating factors at AC Transit that magnify both the causes and effects of this problem, hurting impacting riders.
AC Transit is an incredibly schedule-focused agency. That might seem like a ridiculous thing to say, of course the transit agency is schedule focused, but AC Transit takes it to another level. In this way, AC Transit acts as a perfect example of what happens when on time performance (% of runs that reach their terminal within some fixed number of minutes of their scheduled time) is taken to the extreme.
When the only metric used to measure success is a scheduling compliance metric, this places huge pressure on planners and drivers. Planners write schedules with bizarre padding (or extra time), all concentrated at “time points”, stops where drivers arriving early must wait until their scheduled departure time. This uneven placement of padding is frustrating for riders, and costs a lot of money. Because the district is in perpetual austerity mode, there is pressure to make schedules as lean as possible, which means reducing total runtimes in order to consume less buses and operators to run a given service.
This means that planners write inflexible, fast, unrealistic schedules. These schedules have little resiliency built in. Drivers are punished for falling behind schedule, and in turn passengers are passed up, yelled at, waved on, kicked off, or made to sit at timepoints, all so the driver can keep to their strict, unrealistic schedule.
This makes every day suck, for drivers and for riders. Because of the rigidity of AC Transit schedules, there is very little flexibility in the operation, which becomes apparent when an operator calls out—which they’re more likely to do, because their job is stressful.
Because deviations from the schedule are so discouraged at every level, departures are not adjusted to minimize gaps, and the bus behind a canceled trip is not given extra time to handle extra—and possibly angry—passengers. As a result, they fall behind, making their runs more stressful and creating even more gaps.
The result? Drivers are more likely to call out because their job sucks. Drivers calling out makes things even harder on the remaining drivers, exacerbated by a lack of operational flexibility, making them more likely to call out. Repeat.
I hope to flesh this out more, bring in more data and case studies, and make this into a full blog post.
https://www.mta.info/document/199231 ↩︎
— 02:18