Outside the Vineyard Church’s Healing Center in Springdale, three freshly decaled 20-foot Ram transit vans gleam in the sun. Members of the community, media, politicians, and Cincinnati Metro staff gather round for a ribbon cutting and photo op to inaugurate MetroNow!, a fleet that will eventually grow to about 50 on-demandvehicles serving six zones around Hamilton County.
Like an Uber or a Lyft, MetroNow! is summoned via smart phone (or dispatcher if you’d like to go old school). For $2 a ride, the van arrives and carries you to your destination if it’s local or, if you have farther to go, connects you to Metro’s bus network.
Metro CEO Darryl Haley steps to the mic. “Public transportation is the great equalizer,” he says. “We will use public transportation to drive equity in our region. When we envisioned what MetroNow! could look like, we looked at communities where our service was not as robust.”
They thought of young families and the elderly, he says, as well as job seekers who can’t afford to drive or to take a ride-share service. “Now, if you live, work, or play in Sharonville, Northgate, Mt. Healthy, Forest Park, Springfield Township, Glendale, Woodlawn, Colerain Township, or North College Hill, you’ll be among the first to be able to seamlessly utilize MetroNow! service.”
“All right,” says the woman standing next to me. “Finally!”
MetroNow! is just the beginning of what Cincinnati Metro, which turns 50 this year, is rolling out across the county thanks to passage of Issue 7 in 2020. The new countywide sales tax increase funds SORTA, Metro’s parent agency, for 25 years and supports an ambitious vision, Reinventing Metro, that hopes to spur community change beyond just improving bus service.
Even if you aren’t a bus rider, you can expect to feel the effects of what Haley and his team imagine for our region’s roads over the next two decades.
In 1972, in the midst of a global oil crisis, Cincinnati residents approved an earnings tax to fund the foundering Cincinnati Transportation Inc., a private bus company created from the city’s previous streetcar lines. The following year, the freshly minted Southwest Ohio Transit Authority (SORTA) took over Cincinnati’s bus service, and “Queen City Metro” was born. The acquisition immediately lowered fares, which had been some of the highest in the nation, to 25 cents a ride.
For most of its five decades in operation, the city earnings tax remained the agency’s main source of funding. It wasn’t enough. Several attempts to remedy a perpetual funding shortage failed, the most recent being the 2002 Metro Moves plan, which sought to beef up funding, improve bus service, and add light rail to meet a growing region’s needs.
In March 2020, in an election where turnout was hampered by the COVID pandemic, Hamilton County voters approved Issue 7 by a narrow margin. The levy replaces the portion of the city earnings tax that funds SORTA, which oversees Metro and countywide paratransit services, with a 0.8 percent sales tax increase. Three-quarters of the money collected each year goes to improving Metro bus services, while 25 percent goes to a transit infrastructure fund (TIF) that directs money to improving roads, sidewalks, bridges, crosswalks, and other projects falling within three quarters of a mile of a bus route. That includes the Western Hills Viaduct, which received $205 million from the fund in 2021. Fiscal conservatives who balked at previous transit levies liked that Issue 7 reduced the city earnings tax.
Haley joined Metro in 2006 after returning to the region to help family following the death of his father. After stints as executive vice president and chief operating officer, he was named CEO and general manager in November 2019. He says the difference transit can make in a person’s life is personal—while a student at Withrow High School, he rode the bus every day to his first job, a role that led to a 28-year career in the healthcare supply sector. “I wouldn’t have had that job if I didn’t have the ability to catch the bus,” he says, recalling that the experience instilled a strong sense of how public transit drives equity.
“But even though the country had changed and our region had changed since 1972, Metro was still on the same funding system,” he says. “It was a fight to keep as much service as we could. Every time you cut service, someone doesn’t have a connection, and that changes the fabric of the region.”
It’s a quandary faced by transit agencies nationwide. Success relies on ridership. But when falling ridership leads to further funding cuts, cities are forced to cut service, and even more riders flee to other modes of transportation. This death spiral was all the more pronounced for Metro given its limited funding model.
When he took over as CEO, Haley knew another voter referendum loomed. So he refused to cut service, even when that decision came at the cost, he says, of deferring garage maintenance and technology upgrades.
SORTA convened a working group in 2018 to study the need for new funding and better service. Grassroots organizations including the Better Bus Coalition joined city and business leaders to call for a new funding mechanism. They worked with the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI) to determine travel patterns, Haley says, and see where people were living and where they worked. “We spent a lot of time, and I mean a lot of time, talking to the community, the business community, and elected officials and asking, How do you connect this region in a real way,” he says. “As we were fighting to get through this, we came up with Reinventing Metro.”
There’s a unifying message behind the plan, Haley says, “even for those who don’t ride the bus. Even those we never expect to ride. It’s this: The people you depend on depend on transit.”
Haley depends on Khaled Shammout to lead the day-to-day work of analyzing and upgrading a bus system that serves a 400-square-mile region that’s home to more than 2 million people and is growing. As Metro’s chief strategic officer, he scrutinizes data gleaned from on-board GIS sensors and pores through community feedback to find efficiencies that will improve service. Sprawling organizational charts cover his office walls.
Shammout’s 28-year career in transit began with an internship at the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) in Columbus. From there he went to leadership roles in Palm Beach and Jacksonville, Florida, as well as Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia, before joining Metro in 2018. He’s an avid reader and author. His 2021 book, The Implosion of Public Transit and the Case for an Infinite Game, outlines transit’s existential crisis and offers a path through survival to thriving. His book applies scholar James Carse’s concept of the “infinite game,” adopting long-term strategies based not on finite targets but on a continuum of improvement.
In a landscape where transit competes with a plethora of options for getting around, Shammout says, transit agencies must adapt or die. His work is complicated—tiny tweaks can make a big difference for both Metro drivers and riders, impacting efficiency across the system.
“In transit, certain fundamentals apply,” he says. “The more frequency we have, the more ridership we gain. If you have buses running just once an hour, people are not going to wait an hour to catch a trip, right? If buses are running every 15 minutes, that’s an incentive for people to ride. Likewise, if the bus doesn’t go where you need it to when you need it, you aren’t going to take it.”
So Metro has created new bus routes, including cross-town routes outside of the old downtown-centric hub-and-spoke map; built a new transit hub in Northside; increased frequency on 10 routes; and added Sunday service to some routes. And in a first for Cincinnati, says Shammout, seven routes were converted to run 24-hour service—important for areas where he identified high concentrations of third-shift jobs. He says that those routes, as well as those with increased frequency, have shown significant increases in ridership.
In the first quarter of 2023, Metro was back to 80 percent of pre-pandemic ridership. Ridership on routes with upgraded service saw increases as high as 200 percent.
“So to put it in context, the rest of the country is somewhere between 65 and 70 percent of pre-pandemic ridership,” says Haley. “These numbers are showing that we built it, and they’re coming. They’re returning and riding.”
This summer’s rollout of MetroNow! service marks a significant turning point. It manifests the expansion of Metro’s geographic footprint across Hamilton County, making new service available to suburban residents who can’t easily reach fixed bus routes.
The next big step is bus rapid transit (BRT), which creates high-speed bus service corridors akin to light rail. Metro is planning to complete the first two corridors by 2027. BRT has worked well for other Midwestern cities, both moving people quickly and attracting billions in real estate and economic investment dollars.
BRT will tie together communities across the region by deploying larger, often articulated buses that support level boarding with elevated platforms providing a light-rail-like service, moving along major street corridors that are a hybrid of bus-only and in-traffic lanes. BRT buses will also get signal priority to move ahead of traffic at intersections. They’ll arrive every 15 minutes or less, so frequent you won’t even need to consult a schedule, says Shammout, who senses that BRT will impact how county residents move and, by making corridors attractive to developers, where they choose to live.
In recent decades, the American transit landscape has seen an explosion of new options. Think of the rise of Uber and Lyft, the availability of rentable electric scooters and bikes, and on-demand “micro-transit” options like MetroNow! vans. Even that old workhorse, the bus, has been transformed. With free WiFi and charging ports, real-time arrival information, and a smoother ride, says Haley, “This is not your father’s bus.”
All of the options compete for attention at a rare inflection point when more and more people are suddenly open to changing their relationships with cars.
Younger Americans are reconsidering the necessity of car ownership, driven by economic realities, concern for the environment, and other factors. Some families are buying a bus pass instead of shelling out for a second car. In 2022, according to the American Automobile Association, car ownership cost the average American $10,728 a year. That’s about $900 a month on your vehicle at a time when gas, food, and housing aren’t exactly cheap.
“It isn’t unusual to find riders who may use Uber to get to a light rail station that will take them to work, and then on the way home take a bus to meet friends at a restaurant and a bike-share or scooter-share for the final leg of their trip,” says American Public Transportation Association CEO Paul Skoutelas when I reach out to get a sense of how Metro’s upgrades fit into the national landscape.
“The trend in public transportation is to offer riders more options—in terms of different modes, times, accessibility, fares—and then to connect those options physically and digitally.”
Americans have come to expect customized services, picking and choosing from a wide spectrum of options based on their needs, their lifestyles, and their budgets. When it comes to transit, then, “cities with the most options are likely to thrive,” says Skoutelas.
Metro’s BRT project aims to link as many transportation modes as possible, from park-to-ride locations at the end of each BRT corridor to level boarding from platforms to make buses more wheelchair-, bike-, and scooter-friendly. And stops are designed to align with other transit options.
At a projected cost of $300 million, Cincinnati’s first two BRT corridors will roll out along Reading Road and Hamilton Avenue, with Montgomery Road and Glenway Avenue receiving improvements during that construction phase in anticipation of their conversion to BRT down the line.
Gus Ricksecker, 26, is a member of the generation that no longer sees car ownership as essential. He commutes by bus to his job at City Hall, where he’s chief of staff for Councilmember Reggie Harris, who was a big Issue 7 proponent. Ricksecker takes the bus for most errands and entertainment, including some of those new late-night buses—which he says are often packed. He’s saving money for a condo down payment, perhaps in a building along one of the BRT corridors.
“A very tangible impact of passing Issue 7 is that BRT can fundamentally change the future growth of the city in terms of where dense new housing is built,” says Ricksecker. “We’re doing a lot of zoning reform, and there’s more talk about zoning and land use reform here. And at the center of that conversation is bus rapid transit.”
As affordable housing advocates and city officials haggle over how to build more housing options, the creation of robust BRT corridors literally lays a path forward. More mobility means more freedom in terms of where we live, allowing more residents to live in affordable areas and driving what urban planners call “transit-oriented development.”
“Apartment buildings are going up around the city, but in locations that aren’t necessarily intentional,” says Ricksecker. “It’s just wherever developers can grab land, essentially. But if we start building more apartments in major transit corridors, we’ll get more transit users and get more people out of their cars.”
In other cities that introduced BRT, transit-oriented development sprung up along the corridors and property values close to the routes rose. Cleveland’s $200 million Healthline BRT generated about $9.5 billion in development, for instance. An Ohio State University study of how BRT impacts property values in 10 U.S. cities found that multi-family residences along the corridors saw a 41.5 percent increase in property value.
Meanwhile, a 2018 UC Economics Center study estimated Reinventing Metro should create close to 20,000 more jobs and make 740 more employers accessible by Metro. The new 24-hour service will reach more than half of Hamilton County jobs, or 10,000 employers. The same study estimates that increasing employers’ access to a larger workforce could save businesses between $20 million and $30 million by reducing turnover.
While Reinventing Metro should generate economic benefits throughout the region, environmental and societal benefits aren’t as easy to quantify. More people on public transit means less traffic congestion, which means less pollution, energy usage, and carbon emissions. Nationally, U.S. mass transit saves 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline per year.
Sustainability in the face of climate change matters to young Americans. Metro does everything from washing buses with rainwater to operating hybrid buses, with plans this year to use federal funds to purchase 11 fully electric buses. BRT will use zero-emission vehicles.
In many ways, transit-oriented development can lead to greener neighborhoods and business districts. It allows parking minimum requirement codes to be reformed, rendering them outdated in settings where you don’t necessarily need a car. Less parking makes neighborhoods cleaner, cooler, and more resilient to climate change. Many Cincinnati neighborhoods have begun to remove parking minimums, a step in the right direction given that there are approximately 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S.—between four and eight spaces per car, by some estimates.
Public transit is 10 times safer than driving, says Skoutelas of the American Public Transportation Association, and makes streets safer for drivers by reducing the total number of cars on the road. Transit users are healthier because they’re also pedestrians getting in their daily steps.
More jobs, additional dollars in our pockets, and a greener, more pleasant city—improved public transit seems to be a panacea. How about the less quantifiable yet no less important benefits that reliable, accessible transit offers on a societal level? Consider the interactions that happen in denser neighborhoods or on a shared transit system, where we aren’t walled off behind the wheel of a car. Isn’t there value in living face to face, especially at a time when intolerance seems to be on the rise?
Robert Putnam decries the erosion of American civic life and relationships in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. It’s partly due, he says, to suburbanization and the rise of the single-occupancy car commuter. “Spatial fragmentation between the home and the workplace is bad for community,” he writes.
More reliable and frequent bus service probably isn’t the go-to solution for society’s ills, but it can better connect the home and the workplace for many citizens. And that’s a start, isn’t it? “The transit network we’re building today will determine what happens next,” says Haley. “Once we build BRT and people see how quickly they can move through corridors, maybe the conversation changes. As we build this robust transit system and people decide, I don’t need a car, I’ve got a connection, then we really start thinking differently about the future.”
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