Is the Bus Still Running? Seriously… is the Bus Still Running??

This column is the sixth of a seven-part series in partnership with Chicago-based transit planner extraordinaire Joshua Woods, who authors Thoughts About Cities. Titled “Transit Planning 101,” it’s the transit planning boot camp you wish you got in planning school. Learn more about Joshua and the inspiration for the column, and read his other installments here. 

Generally, Chicagoland transit keeps me captivated enough that I listen to Wayne when it comes to transit issues away from home.

However, I’m nervous. Public transit in the United States feels like it might be on the precipice of something existential. Since the pandemic, the cost of the inputs of operating transit service (diesel fuel, operator wages, electricity) have increased. Many of the budgets for operating transit service have not. With pandemic relief funding drying up, transit authorities across the nation are being forced to reconcile with some ugly questions.

• Can we still afford to run the bus?
• Do we have the political capital (and public support) to ask for more money if the answer is no?
• What is the cheapest option to avoid this question?

I don’t envy this position. Faced with this question, some places are passing additional funding, some are finding gap funding, and some are playing chicken. 

Some places are just making those cuts. I grew up in one of the places opting to just make the cuts.

Indebus (Independence, MO)

I live in Chicago, but I grew up in Kansas City, MO.¹ My first professional experience with transit was dispatching for Indebus, the fixed route transit system serving Independence, MO. Indebus operated six bus routes that ran every 1-2 hours,² plus ADA paratransit service.

As a dispatcher, I made sure all routes were staffed, kept tabs on the timeliness of the fixed route buses, scheduled rides for the paratransit buses and manned the customer service line. This was easily a two person, if not a three person job.³ Indebus could afford to hire one person.⁴ It was chaos.

After that summer, I knew transit was the line of work for me. 

In January, 2025, faced with increased transit operating costs, Indebus suspended all fixed route service and replaced it with a six-month Microtransit pilot program to test its feasibility for replacing fixed route service.

RideKC (Kansas City, MO)

On March 26th, 2025, RideKC announced a series of public meetings to discuss potential changes to their bus network. These changes include the elimination of 13 of their 29 routes, the elimination of weekend service on all but 7 of their routes, and weekday frequency reductions on 1 of their 3 MAX lines. 

The reason for these changes? From the press release:

“Proposed service reductions are a result of the increased cost of providing public transit in the post- COVID years and the depletion of federal pandemic funds.”

If the plan presented in public meetings had moved forward, beyond the passengers left without a ride, over 100 bus drivers were expected to be laid off as a result of this change.

In August 2025, The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a 12 month operating contract that preserved existing bus service, and reinstated bus fares at $2 per ride.⁶

In October 2025, the agency held their inaugural MovingKC Regional Mobility Summit to “convene regional leaders, elected officials, business stakeholders, and transportation advocates to explore new funding strategies that support a stronger, more unified regional transit system.” 

So what’s the point?

The annual cost of owning and operating a car in the US is about $13k/year. Public transit lets you opt out of bearing this expense. 

Wherever you live, parking probably sucks in the most in-demand neighborhoods. Public transit lets you opt out of finding parking.

Around 40k people die in traffic crashes each year in the United States. Transit lets individuals inside and outside of cars opt out of this carnage.

Municipal budgets are getting tight, leaving many localities forced to pick the services they think are important to provide, and dump the rest. This puts transit on the chopping block across the nation. For bigger cities where transit is more widely adopted, or cities of all sizes where transit is valued politically, new funding sources will emerge. To find and maintain support for that funding, these places need to lean into the 5:1 rule and ensure the service they deliver is frequent, reliable, and well designed.

In places where transit is less valued politically, transit’s future is less certain. For places uninterested in spending more on transit, but unwilling to bear the political weight of cutting service altogether, microtransit might be an appealing solution — more on Microtransit in my next and final installment of this series. If overall demand is low, microtransit might actually be a valid substitute. However, microtransit has a much lower capacity than traditional fixed-route transit. If the bus lines that microtransit service is attempting to replace carried more than 5 passengers per hour, microtransit service is probably going to be overwhelmed.⁷

In places where budget allocations for transit are unlikely to change, overwhelmed microtransit might be best case scenario in a lose-lose game.

I hope I’m wrong.

1 Not Kansas. It’s a touchy subject if you grew up in Kansas City. 🫣

2 The orange and yellow lines share a bus, with one route running every even hour and the other running every odd hour.

3 As a cherry on top, the depot only had dial up. Manning the customer service line was mostly figuring out where people were based on landmarks (as they described them) and waiting for Google Maps to tell me where that actually was.

4 I was actually an intern technically. We needed two dispatchers; one to cover the AM shift and one to cover the PM shift. It was cheaper to just have me cover the AM.

5 Here’s a Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) review of Microtransit.

6 RideKC stopped collecting fares in March 2020. Before this, but fare was $1.50 per ride

7 Indebus routes were at 13-15 passengers per hour before service was suspended.