Clark County’s C-TRAN wins transit agency award

Earlier this month, C-TRAN, the regional public transportation provider for Clark County, was named the 2022 North American Transit System of the Year for a transit agency making four million or less rides a year by the American Public Transportation Association. The news was first reported by The Columbian, which also noted that the agency first won the award in 2019. Earlier this year, C-TRAN launched a door-to-door rideshare service to link residents living in Camas, Ridgefield and other county locations to downtown Vancouver and a transit hub. Its board of directors also approved a year-long temporary fare reduction for fixed route bus rides and express service to Portland. Joining us is C-TRAN CEO Shawn Donaghy to discuss the future of the agency and what he thinks are the top challenges for public transit in the county and region.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB. This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. C-TRAN, the public transportation provider for Clark County, was recently named the best agency of its size in North America. The award was given out by the American Public Transportation Association. It’s the second time C-TRAN has received this honor since 2019. Earlier this year, Citroen launched a door to door ride hailing service for people in outlying areas. It also reduced fares for its services. Shawn Donaghy is the CEO of C-TRAN. He joins us now to talk about this award and the future of public transit in the region. Welcome to the show.

Shawn Donaghy: Thank you for having me. Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a whirlwind month. We’re pretty excited. A lot of good energy happening.

Miller: What did go through your mind when you find out that your organization had won this award for the second time since 2019?

Donaghy: I was blown away. I would tell you I wasn’t surprised. If you knew our employees and you knew our community, you would know that they’re certainly deserving of this, but it’s hard to win one. I’m third generation C-TRAN. So my grandfather and my father have done this for a long time, and it’s hard enough for an agency to win one award. So to win two in a three year span is pretty incredible. But it speaks volumes of our employees and speaks volumes of our community, and I was pretty shocked, but also extremely happy at the same time.

Miller: Did your father or grandfather ever get this award once?

Donaghy: Yeah, my dad did. It was named something a little different back in the eighties, but when he worked in the Tri-state area in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, they won one year back in the mid-eighties.

Miller: But you’ve done it twice.

Donaghy: It would be an interesting thanksgiving dinner.

Miller: What are the specific pieces of policies or projects that you’ve put forward, and the team, over the last couple of years, that you think made the difference?

Donaghy: I think we’ve shifted our approach. I just surpassed my fifth year here and I think the approach that we’ve taken, is we understand that transit is our day job, and so we sort of branch off of that and we really try to talk about things like how are we impacting community involvement, how are we impacting equity and climate, diversity of our not only our employees, but our organization, and the influence we have in our community. And I think that that played a lot into it, that we know we’re in a difficult situation right now where we’re just coming out of the pandemic and transit agencies are there to rebound ridership. They’re trying to move to what’s next essentially for them. And I think you’re seeing in our area specifically on both sides of the river that the transit agencies are a huge part of that, especially for us. We have a lot of essential workers. And so I think a lot of that went into the judging for how we won the award. Just the transportation piece is important, it’s one big component of it, but it’s also equally important about the initiatives that we take with the community through our free student passes or our partnerships with Workforce Southwest Washington or our local government agencies. And we just try to make it a lot more than transit, and I think our employees are a huge part of that.

Miller: What were the early days of the pandemic like for C-TRAN in terms of, I’m thinking in particular about ridership?

Donaghy: Yeah, it was tough. When we first entered into the pandemic we saw a little less than half of our ridership decrease, the majority of that ridership was our commuter service over into Portland. Our local service actually stayed pretty strong. In fact we experienced for much of the pandemic the lowest drop in ridership of any transit agency in the state of Washington and I think that had a lot to do with Clark County specifically [having] a lot of essential workers. There were a lot of people that either needed access to services or needed to get to work, and we have a route specifically that has doctors and nurses that goes to Marquam Hill. We run that every day, and that bus was always full. So pandemic was tough, because we wanted to make sure that we were not only taking care of the customers that need the service, but that we were making sure that our employees were taken care of in terms of their health and their well being, and also that of our customers as well. And so it was tough. Really the first six months was sort of an eye opener and so something new coming at you every day. But our team really worked through it and figured it out. And we had our entire team here, even the administrative staff and we just said, ‘look, if you need help with child care, you have to make a schedule adjustment, we’re going to help you do that.’ But we want to keep everybody employed and we want to keep everybody moving forward. And so that was really our mission from day one, was to take care of our employees and make sure that we take care of our customers.

Miller: How much has ridership bounced back?

Donaghy: It’s starting to come back on the commuter side and our paratransit service, I think a lot faster than we thought it would. Our paratransit and commuter service took about a 70% dip, which is a smaller portion of our overall ridership, but we’re starting to see that rebound almost to the right around the 50% mark. Our local service has always stayed strong. We were typically somewhere around 30% ridership drop, maybe a little more, between 30% and 40% during the pandemic. And we’re starting to see that rebound month over month. So we’re optimistic that we’ll be back where we need to be sooner than later. But it’s helped us out frankly through the pandemic to be able to manage things like physical distancing and some of those, to really focus energy on keeping our riders safe. So now that we’re coming out of that, I think we’ll see that ridership start to take off again.

Miller: The Portland area transit agency Trimet, which admittedly is a lot bigger, they’ve been dealing with big driver shortages STILL that have been causing service cuts and delays. Are you seeing the same thing?

Donaghy: We are a little bit. I would say the bigger piece that is impacting us is retirements. Specifically in our driver workforce, we’ve had employees that love to work here, and they want to work way past their 30 years. We’ve had some that have worked over 40, almost 45. I think through the first year of the pandemic, they sort of rode with us and said, ‘okay, I want to see what happens’. And then when we got into the second year, I think they just said, ‘you know what, I’m eligible for retirement. I think I’m going to retire.’ And so we’ve been able to keep up with our normal number of hires. It’s been a little difficult to replace more of the retirements that are happening in real time, because it adds another two or three a month or so to the group that we need to currently bring in. So we’re a little bit behind where we should be right now, but we’re very fortunate that we’re not in a dire straits scenario where we’re pulling back service. I love Trimet, and I’m very close friends with the Ceo Sam Desue over at Trimet, and he and I share those struggles over lunch a lot and just talking on the phone. It’s not lost on me, the struggle that they’re dealing with and I think you’re seeing a lot of that nationwide.

Miller: I’m curious about two things happening at the same time. One, that you’re still seeing that ridership has not come back to pre pandemic levels, so that’s, there’s fewer fares there. At the same time, the C-TRAN board of directors approved cutting fares this year for bus rides and for express rides into Portland, cutting them pretty significantly. Does that mean you’ve had less money to put towards service?

Donaghy:Yeah, that’s a great question. During the pandemic, we were fortunate to be able to get some assistance from the federal government and I think really that was designed to pay for operating and maintenance costs that other agencies may have struggled with in terms of maybe a dip in local tax revenue. We were fortunate that we only experienced a few months of lower tax revenue and then it sort of stabilized itself to a point where we were able to really work within the confines of it, and be able to get some of that federal assistance. And I think we just felt like it was a responsibility for us to be able to sort of pass that back to our customers. And so we used the federal money for our operating and maintenance expenses, and we used essentially the surplus we had from our local tax base, to lower the fares. We just felt like it was a good way to give back to the writers who had been struggling through the pandemic and trying to get back to work. We wanted to ease them back into transit and so we definitely felt like there was a good return on investment for that.

Miller: What percentage of your overall operating budget comes from fares?

Donaghy: You know, it used to be a long time ago, the benchmark was always somewhere between 15 and 20%. We have sort of an interesting fare structure on our side of the river, that our paratransit cost of service is the same as our fixed route cost of service, our normal bus operating service and that’s usually not the case. Usually the paratransit fares double the cost of the normal bus fare. So for our agency we’ve always looked at it as a matter of inflation. We want to try to manage what we want that percentage to be, that’s not really putting an undue burden on the riders. So in the past couple of years it’s been hovering right around 10% or 12%. And then with the pandemic that dropped obviously another probably 5% or so. So it was really a matter for us of evaluating where we thought we were going to be if we had full fares anyway and try to leverage some of that federal money that we got to sort of offset the burden on the riders.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in. We’re talking right now with Shawn Donaghy. He is the CEO of C-TRAN. Clark County’s public transit agency won its second award as the best agency of its size. That means based on the number of trips over the course of the year. The best agency of its size in North America. One of the things that C-TRAN has done recently has become a certified green business. What does that mean in practice?

Donaghy: It’s interesting. Public transit until probably about 10 or 15 years ago, has always sort of been a little behind everybody else on managing things like climate, or even technology for that fact. And one of the things that you were starting to see emerge in our industry is 10 years ago was a move to hybrid buses, and five years ago it was really a push to move towards electric vehicles, or to move towards hydrogen fuel cell or some alternative type of fuel vehicle. But internally it was also sort of managing our practices within the building because we operate in sort of an automotive environment, what we do with the oils that we pull out of the buses, or how we manage things we want to do in the building [like] lighting retrofits. We’ve just been very fortunate that we’ve had a board that continually supports our mission to be climate friendly. We’ve historically always done everything that we can to bring hybrid technology into the building. We do things as small as we recycle cigarette butts from our transit stations, and the Keurig cups out of the coffee machine. We’re very fortunate with the initiatives we have. We won the Clark County Green Business Award twice, we won it two times. That’s really a reflection of our employees desire to want to be a green agency and be and be in that space

Miller: In terms of your fleet though, because I imagine that’s probably the biggest single emitter of CO2, is buses that still run on some version of diesel for the most part. What is the time frame for when you would be all electric or at least non-diesel?

Donaghy: I would say that’s something that we plan about a decade in advance and it usually takes about 10-15 years to completely revamp a fleet. The useful life as defined by the Federal Transit administration is 12 years on a bus, on a big bus. We usually keep them about 15. There’s ways that we can mitigate some of that too. So we have about half of our fleet, maybe a little less, as hybrid, so when it runs at speeds lower than 25 or 20, they’re running on battery drive and then when they’re running faster than that they run on a diesel engine. And then we have 10 electric buses on order. We should have those sometime early next year. But what we’re doing is we’re switching over to – even though it costs the agency a little more money – we’re switching over to renewable diesel. We really pay very close attention to those things, because all of the impacts that we can help be a part of, we want to try to be in the best place we can, that matters to us. And so our maintenance team is very aware of how the fleet has an impact on climate and what they want to do to try to mitigate that.

Miller: Right now, officials in Washington and Oregon are talking about and moving forward on plans for a new bridge over the Columbia. And right now the so-called locally preferred alternative includes extending the Yellow Max line light rail from the Portland expo center to downtown Vancouver. If that happens, and if people can take light rail from downtown Vancouver to Portland and vice versa, what would that mean for the way public transit currently works as set up by C-TRAN? How big a change would this be for your overall operations?

Donaghy: Interestingly enough, I don’t think it would change very much of our operation at all. We have that connectivity right now where we actually run a route from downtown Vancouver to Delta Park to connect to the Yellow Line…

Miller: But with the bus?

Donaghy: Yes, through the bus.

Miller: So you think that people would still take that bus or they would just switch to Max?

Donaghy: No, I think they would switch over to the Max and that’s sort of the one piece that I think would probably be an adjustment for us. But I think it strengthens our network a little bit. It gives us a little better opportunity to really connect the networks at a better location. It would be in a downtown Vancouver scenario versus Expo or Delta Park, which is not used all the time. There’s not a lot of activity there other than just transit. So moving that stop a little further north up the river to Vancouver I think is a good plan. And I think the way we approached it was, the plan in the original CRC, to run the Yellow line through downtown, is not feasible anymore. We want to keep it along the interstate, because C-TRAN really had to reinvent itself after the CRC failed…

Miller: And just for newish comers: the original Columbia River Crossing, the project that the state spent a ton of money planning for, and then the Washington legislature Republicans, they killed it because they didn’t want light rail.

Donaghy: And I think when that initiative failed, C-TRAN really had to reinvent itself in terms of, what is high-capacity transit, and how do we take care of our riders over here? And we did that through the bus rapid transit system and we have one built, we have one that’s under construction right now, and we have at least 2 to 4 more that we’re going to build probably in the next 5 to 8 years. We really wanted to find a new way to connect to the Yellow line and this was really the best way to do that.

Miller: Before I say goodbye, I’m just curious: in the biggest picture, America as a whole, including big parts of Southwest Washington and the other side of the Columbia, the Portland Metro area on the Oregon side, we are still an incredibly car dependent culture. I’m curious what you think needs to be done or could be done to get more people out of their cars and either using public transit or active modes of transportation.

Donaghy: That’s a great question. I always answer that we’re looking for a larger share of the mode share, and not necessarily to force people out of their cars. It’s more [that] if opportunities exist that are frequent and reliable, it may change someone’s habits, their driving habits to want to move over to public transit. And I think that’s been at least a little bit of the roadblock on I-5. That there are only a few options if you live in North County or East County, for Clark County. And even in Portland, it’s very much the same, that if there’s opportunities to skip through the downtown queue on public transit, you can do that, but it’s not the best connection it could be. And so we need to strengthen that. But the bridge as a whole, there’s a significant amount of freight traffic on it as well, and I think we don’t want to create a situation where we’re limiting our ability to grow the area in terms of economy or commerce by congestion on the I-5 roadway, and the best way to sort of tackle that is create other options that may change habits. I think that if those habits, those options are reliable and timely and they’re safe, then people will gravitate to that and want to use those modes.

Miller: Do you use public transit yourself? Not as a kind of undercover CEO, or not purely to check to see how the service is doing, but truly to get from one place to another? Do you use it the way it’s intended?

Donaghy: I use it all the time. In fact, a lot of our employees do too. We have several employees that live in Portland that ride transit over here all the time. I’ve been riding the bus since I was a kid, so I’m no stranger to it and I’m the worst undercover boss because I tweet about it all the time! When I go to Blazers games, I tweet about riding the rail, and when I’m in town, I’ll tweet about riding to lunch or going to city hall for a meeting. I use all modes and public transit is one of the major modes that I use in the toolbox, and I think it’s important people do that. In fact, before the pandemic, we required all of our employees to ride the bus at least once a month and fill out a survey, letting us know how their experience was and introduce themselves to the operator and let them know what they do. And that’s a big piece. If we’re gonna live the brand, we gotta see what it’s all about.

Miller: Shawn Donaghy, it was really fun talking to you. Thanks very much.

Donaghy: Thank you.

Miller: Shawn Donaghy is the CEO of C-TRAN, the regional public transit agency for Clark County.

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