Why
does CATA use such large buses when sometimes there are only a
handful of people on board?
In some instances ridership
is very heavy, but all the people are traveling in one direction,
and when the bus goes back to get another load, it’s empty or
nearly so. Consequently, there’s a 50/50 chance when you see a
particular bus it’ll be empty. For example, in the morning we
carry hundreds and hundreds of riders from Vairo Blvd. into the
Penn State campus, but very few going the other direction. As
a result, you’ll see a lot of near empty buses going out North
Atherton Street - but they’ll be full to overflowing when they
come back.
Other times, we’ll have
a heavy load on only a couple of trips of a route that runs all
day, and the rest of the time the bus will be very lightly patronized.
For example, there are so many riders coming into State College
from Bellefonte at 7:30 am that we need a full-size bus for that
particular trip. Even though we may never have more than a dozen
riders on that route for the whole rest of the day, its actually
cheaper to keep running the large bus that’s already out there
than to bring it all the way back to our garage and exchange it
for a smaller vehicle.
Sometimes we simply don’t
have enough small buses to go around. We have a fleet that consists
of 40', 35' , 30' and 26' buses, and on weekdays during the school
year ridership on many routes is heavy enough that we can do a
really good job of matching capacity to demand. However, on weekends
and during the summer, we don’t have enough small buses to cover
all the routes where ridership will be light. We can’t afford
to keep extra small buses just to run at low ridership times,
so we end up using a bus that’s really too big for conditions.
The Operations and Maintenance
staff at CATA does their absolute best to match the size of bus
with the expected ridership, but for the reasons listed above
and a few others, a lot of time you’re still going to see buses
with lots of empty seats. That’s just the way it is. If you’d
like further information about how CATA deploys its buses, please
contact CATA at 238-2282.
