Last month, Penny Feist was selected to lead Wichita Transit after serving as interim transportation director and assistant director of Public Works & Utilities. For this month's En Route, Feist rides a noisy Q-line with Hugo Phan to discuss her new role, as well as her plans to improve city bus service.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Do you see a difference between the time of year with ridership? Are there more riders during the school year?
Yeah, because of our partnership with USD 259 and Wichita State University, we do see an increase in ridership during the school year. It does dive off a little bit in the summer, so just for a few months, we're able to kind of regroup and … do some bus maintenance and give our drivers a little bit of a break from the overtime that they're working. But the school year is definitely [a] busy time.
Do we have enough bus drivers?
I would love more bus drivers. We have about 10 positions open, and so my goal is to get all of those filled as soon as possible, especially to meet that school demand. We do provide training so you don't have to [have] experience driving a bus; you don't have to bring a CDL (commercial driver’s license). We will help train you, and we have a very successful training program … within the transit department. So, almost 100% of our employees who start with us and train get their CDL within the first few months.
And so that is really a key component to be able to provide reliable and frequent service, right? Because the frequency of service is limited by the number of buses that we have and the number of bus drivers that we have.
Tell me about the fleet of buses. Any updates that we need to make, or do you feel like you're happy with the buses that we have?
So we have 50 buses. Eleven of those are electric, and … several of them … are nearing the end of their useful life. You can run a bus between 12 and 14 years. And so, we have several coming up next year that need to be replaced. We'll go through a process of applying for grant funding to see if we can get those paid for that way and then procure more buses.
We're currently analyzing the savings from the electric buses. We know that there [are] operational savings from going from diesel to electric, but we want to make sure that we're incorporating all of the costs in our analysis … the cost of repairs. What we found is [that] sometimes electric vehicles go down, and you're waiting longer for parts because there's not as many electric buses … in the market as there is diesel, right? [So] we [want] to take in all of those factors into consideration … so we can determine what the best way is to proceed with our bus purchase.
So do you have uses for electric and diesel buses for different types of situations?
Electric buses … can't run all day long. They need to stop for a charge, whereas you can run a diesel all day long without refueling, which is OK because we typically have a lull in the middle of the day. But we also see changes when the temperature swings … you have a very hot day or a very cold day. You're using more electricity to keep the buses hot or cool, and that can also impact its range. And so we live in Kansas and it can get very hot and very cold, right? So, just taking all those things into consideration, if you had a fully electric fleet, you would need more buses than if you had a fully diesel fleet.
So tell me what you love about riding the bus.
I have a great story. I talked to someone, and I think it's just adorable … he lives out west, which doesn't have as much service as the east side does, but actually it has just the right amount of service for him. There's a bus stop near his house. His daughter [recently] became a teenager, she got her driver's license, and he came to the point where he was like, “OK, am I going to buy a car, or am I going to make her buy a car? What am I going to do?” And what he ended up deciding was, “I just go to and from work, and if I can get to it on the bus, she can have my car.” And so that's what he did. He gave her his car, and then he started taking the bus to and from work. And he said he feels like a king. He says he sits back there, he gets his work bag out, he starts working on his emails right before he gets to the office, and he has the short walk from his house to the bus stop, and then a short walk from his bus stop to his office.
Those are the kinds of stories that I really enjoy. I think that most of us think of the people who are dependent upon transit, but now we want to have a conversation open up to people who elect to use transit. And I think that's the most satisfying or rewarding part for me.
So let's talk about times. One thing people have told me a few times is that they wish the buses ran later. What kind of data are you seeing? Do people want later times?
I think that most of the people who want extended service want later times. And I think that is meant to serve that second shift, right? So people right now can get to work, but they can’t get home on Wichita Transit. And so how late do we need to extend hours in order for people to make that connection?
What we've heard so far from the survey is, first of all, it's more frequent service, and then it's later service, and then it's Sunday service. And so those are the, I think, the top three things that we've heard so far.
Tell me about the multimodal center. What’s it going to look like and where are you at on construction?
So, we are currently in the process of putting it out for rebid. It was out once already. We got one bid. We want to put it back out and see if we can get more competition to build the project. We should be able to open bids by the end of August or early September, and from there we can move into contracts for construction.
So, we're hoping the whole thing, once all of that is sorted out, will take about 18 months. It's going to be a very aesthetically beautiful design for the building. … [We’ll have] three levels of parking. It's going to have some administrative offices. It's going to have an operation center for our ticketing staff. It's going to have the best connections. It's going to have some storage lockers for people who ride their bikes to the transit center. There are going to be bike racks and locks for them as well. There's going to be a scooter hub there so you can take the electric scooters. And it's got some really beautiful art, public art designs, and so I'm really excited to see that coming to life. But it's going to be, hopefully … done by 2026.
