The Citizens Advisory on Transit (CAT) met on March 19, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. in City Hall Room 104. Although a quorum was not met – only three of seven members were present (Jesse O'Driscoll, Parker M Acree, Derek S Aiono) – the committee heard informational reports and discussed proposed Spring 2026 service changes in a non‑voting session. Members gave informal verbal support for the changes, which are scheduled to take effect April 26, 2026.
Since Jesse is not here, I'll just go through. So we have two main items on here. It would be the January transit reports. This is really just for information purposes. So every month we will release a report that is late for two months. So we are in March, you are not getting the January report. In April, you'll be getting the free bill report just to give you a state of transit, what our ridership numbers are on time and what our financials are looking like. So I attached a copy of the report to the agenda. Um we have fixed route data, we have zips, which is our power transit service, and then we have our financials for both fixed route and for zips. So with fixed routes, you would see that uh, and again the green bar is for 2025 last year, and then this other color is for 2026. So we are sort of comparing what's happening this year to what happened last year, and you would see uh January ridership is a bit higher than what we had in 2025, which actually showing some growth. We have what our completed trips here, which is basically how many trips we scheduled were we able to complete. So in January, we had a completion rate of 99.96. So we've missed, I think about six trips the whole of January. And our target for completed trips is actually 100. So we are hoping that every month we are able to complete every trip we've scheduled, but this is not at the target yet, but still pretty close. Okay, you would see the green line for 2025. You could tell what some of those percentages are. So there's actually a good improvement. To measure how effective we are, we usually consider ridership per vehicle revenue hour. Our target for that is 15 riders per hour. Currently, for January 2026, we were at 6.4 riders per hour. Even with that, if you compare to what we had in January 2025, that was 5.73 all through till September of last year, that is when we were able to reach 6.7. But it seems we have started a bit strong this year with the 6.4 instead of the 5.7 we had in January. For ZIPS, which is our paratransit service, ridership was a bit lower than what we had as compared to last year. On time is also slightly low, ridership per hour is also slightly low, but uh new contractor or our subcontractor, transverse subcontractor. So translate subcontract service power transfer services to my city. So transdev only does or focuses on fixed routes and then my CD does power transit. They've been working really hard to get these numbers up. So hopefully for the rest of the months or the rest of the months and the year, we should see these numbers going up. For our financials, these numbers are not very much up to date. Some of the things we spent on are yet to hit our accounts. This is just January. So as we update these ridership or monthly reports through February, March, we are hopefully we are hoping to see these numbers show what the true state of transit is. So I'll just quickly glance through this, but they are not as accurate as you want them to be because some of our financials are still getting our accounts. So as I as I said, we would provide you with these reports every month, and you could review them and come with any questions you have on them. Okay. So we usually have service changes twice every year, mostly in the spring and the fall. And these service changes just allow us to look at our system, see what's working, what's not, and just realign service to where demand is. Okay. So I'll give an update for what happened during the fall before I go into what we'll be doing this spring. So in the fall, we discontinued four routes, which is 103, 202, 217, and 309. We made some route frequency changes to our week weekend and evening service. So in the evenings, we have service every 30 minutes from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. We change that to every hour because ridership was just not meeting up with that demand, and we just had to cut back on service a bit. Also, we realigned four routes, we had to shorten one route. And what that looked like after the changes were that we were currently at 30 routes, we moved to 26 routes. We cut back on our revenue miles and revenue hours. So what guided these changes we made in the fall was that our operating expense.