Every 15 minutes, all day long and deep into the night, the mostly empty, 28,000-pound Utah Transit Authority turbo diesel buses struggle loudly up the steep grades of L Street.
In August, the UTA added this incursion into the historic Avenues neighborhood by extending a popular existing bus route — 209 — that previously traveled between the Fashion Place shopping center in Murray and downtown Salt Lake City.
In the new, 2.3-mile Avenues extension, the 40-foot-long vehicles — downshifting to manage daunting 11% grades — are often so eerily empty that some residents along the extension route have taken to calling them “ghost buses.”
An analysis of UTA ridership statistics shows that in the first five months that the 209 extended route has been in service, the 134 buses that ply the route on weekdays average only 1.2 combined boardings and “alightings” per trip through the heart of the Avenues.
Despite these dismal numbers, UTA’s managers say they couldn’t be more pleased.
“Our ridership, particularly in the Avenues, has been wonderful,” said UTA Executive Director Jay Fox.
Quoting from an internal “talking points” staff memo, Fox said that overall Avenues bus ridership is up by 34%, albeit from a small base of only 708 passengers. Meanwhile, UTA increased the number of Avenues bus trips by 54%, from 126 to 194, including post-midnight and pre-dawn runs that are almost always completely empty.
But where Avenues residents see empty buses, neighborhood disruption and conspicuous waste, UTA officials see a positive trend that helps them better manage their understaffed workforce and allow for such things as union-negotiated bathroom breaks for drivers. Critics of the change are often casually dismissed as NIMBYs or know-nothings.
“Transit system design is not just based on reaction to existing performance,” UTA Manager of Service Planning Eric Callison explained in his memo to Fox before the January trustees meeting. “UTA measures the transit propensity of current and potential routes to develop and prioritize future service changes.”
“You don’t want the buses to be full, because if they were, it would be time to add more service,” Callison wrote, apparently suggesting this to Fox as a joke.
This attitude reflects the air of unreality and condescension that has long surrounded the quasi-governmental, cosmetically regulated UTA “transit district” that gets most of its money in dedicated sales tax from the cities and counties it serves.
Its anticipated 2023 operating revenue of $671 million — including $529.3 million from sales tax — is greater than the national budgets of 53 of the world’s smaller countries. UTA will spend more than $150 million this year just servicing its $2-billion debt.
According to the transparent.utah.gov, 100 UTA employees make more than $130,000 a year in base pay and fringe benefits that would be the envy of most private workers. This tax money largesse endures after several efforts to lower bloated UTA salaries.
What the UTA does not have is significant ridership and passenger fare income. Ridership in 2022 was 25.3 million passenger trips, a little more than half of what it was in pre-COVID year 2019 at 44.2 million trips. Fox said he does not expect UTA ridership to reach pre-COVID levels until at least 2025.
According to my calculations, based on the most recent 2021 statistics available from the National Transit Database, UTA’s taxpayer subsidy per trip of $13.05 is one of the worst in its class of transit agencies, surpassed in inefficiency only by DART of Dallas at $14.93 and VTA of San Jose at an ungodly $31.98.
Most people, including those of us in the Avenues who lately feel assaulted by waves of ghost buses, understand that public transit is a public service and is worthy of some level of taxpayer subsidy.
Just please don’t tell us that the noisy, completely empty bus that roars by our house at midnight is not an empty bus but rather a “transit propensity” that is part of an amazing success story. And yes, Mr. Callison, a “full bus” passing by our homes would certainly be better than an empty one, even if it meant “adding more service.” At least that way we would all know that the public is being well served.
Rone Tempest
Rone Tempest is a former longtime national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and 5th generation Avenues resident.
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