IA: What They're Thinking: The future of Iowa City Transit

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Iowa City Transit ridership increased 30 percent, or about 388,700 rides, from 2023 to 2024 in the first full calendar year of the city's fare-free transit program.

The city launched a two-year pilot program to try free fares, funded through pandemic relief funds, in August 2023 to encourage people to use public transit and as part of the city's climate action goals. The city previously charged $1 per ride.

Iowa City Transit had about 1.26 million rides in 2023, which increased to about 1.65 million in 2024.

The Iowa City Council recently approved a 1 percent gas and electric franchise fee increase in the fiscal 2026 budget, estimated to provide the city with an additional $1 million each year to support the fare-free transit program.

Iowa City Transportation Director Darian Nagle-Gamm sat down with The Gazette to talk about the fare-free program and the future of Iowa City Transit. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: How has the fare free transit initiative been?

A: It's been wildly successful and it's working for the public. You do a lot of projects and you try to push needle in so many different initiatives, and this has probably been the most well-received and the most successful one that I've been fortunate to have been a part of. We were trying to make it as easy as possible so people could just hop on board, and the community took advantage of it and we've heard nearly all positive feedback on the program. So part of our mission now and going forward is to find ways to cover that fare revenue that's gone, which, fortunately for us, it is a much smaller piece of the total revenue puzzle than people probably expect — it's less than 10 percent. Transit agencies across the United States are all heavily subsidized in different ways. We have to pull in revenue sources from our local revenue sources. The state helps to contribute. The federal government helps contribute to our operations.

It was very easy for us to launch it, because it's very easy for us to just kind of not take the fare, as opposed to changing routes and tables and things like that. Our staff really loves it because that gives them more time to just interact with passengers, reduces conflicts at the fare box and it makes for a more pleasant experience for our drivers and for passengers hopping on board. It takes time to collect a fare, and it makes it harder for our drivers to keep the buses on time, so our on-time performance has increased as a result of fare free. It's been a real win-win program, and again, it's been wildly successful.

We will be going to the council again as the funding piece is something that we're going to have to think about every year when we prepare the budget. That's going to be a point of discussion, because things are flexing as we're hearing at the state level with property tax reform, and the federal level, there's just a lot of unknowns. It's going to be something that we're going to have to be continually revisiting.

Q: What's next for Iowa City Transit?

A: We've been on a mission to improve our transit service and make it a better service for those that rely on it, but also make it an easier choice for others for years.

We've been through a complete in-depth study of all of our operations. We've made changes to all of our routes to make them faster, more frequent, more reliable. We've really moved the needle on both our service levels to try to improve our service. We can't get much better than where we're at right now with the fare.

And so this year, we're looking to turn our attention in two ways, one is to the bus stops themselves. We're working through the process of developing a (request for proposals). We would like to bring someone on board to help us do kind of a formal evaluation of all of our transit stops and figure out what improvements can be made in the future to make our transit stops more safe and comfortable for the public. So that's kind of where we're turning our attention to, is the infrastructure towards transit.

The other piece is the transit facility project. We received a significant $19 million grant, or two grants, actually, from the federal government to replace our existing transit facility, which is 40 years old. They're kind of designed for a 40-year life. We have some aging condition issues that definitely need to be addressed, but also we just can't expand. We have buses that sleep at night, if you will, in the bus wash because we don't have a place to put them in our storage facility. In order to continue to elevate our service for the community and support our growing population in our community, we clearly need a new facility. We were thrilled to win that grant award in recent years, and we're working through the design process right now, which is pretty exciting. Right now, we have a architectural and engineering firm, designing concepts for what that could potentially look like, and we're planning to co-locate with the city's equipment division as they're also in need of a facility. Ideally, we would like to create some efficiencies by co-locating both of us together. That's another big, exciting project that's going to only improve our transit service and allow us to continue to expand and improve services into the future.

Q: Can you talk a bit about the city's electric bus fleet?

A: We have four electric buses currently and we were also awarded funding for four additional electric buses. Proterra is our manufacturer, and we launched them in 2022, and it's been a great to pilot that program, and we were super excited to launch electric vehicles here because our energy supplier, Mid-American Energy, is now producing the equivalent of the demand for all communities that use their energy in renewable energy. From a sustainability standpoint, there's no more sustainable way that you can transport people in your community than by the transit system that's run off clean energy.

We're in a period of transition right now because Proterra, as a company, went through the Chapter 11 process last year. Unfortunately, that has put us in a bit of a tough spot, because since it's new technology, we don't have decades of experience repairing them like we do with the diesel vehicle. We're heavily dependent on our manufacturer to be a good partner with us for support and for repairs and for parts sourcing. And unfortunately, we have not had the same level of support that we did previously, and it's making it difficult for us to repair and support and keep buses on the road. Our buses, all of them, require consistent maintenance because they're driving constantly, and we just aren't getting that support from them. We're trying to work through those issues.

But the reason I say we're in a period of transition is because we're very excited that the new buses that we were awarded. We're switching manufacturers to Gillig. Our diesel buses are Gilligs and they have a long history in providing excellence and service. They took a little longer to come to market with their with their electric buses, because I think they really wanted to get it right, and so we're excited to be partnering with them. We're moving to a manufacturer that we think is better positioned to be our long-term partner as we continually seek to expand our low or no emissions fleet.

Q: Is the goal to have a full fleet of low- or zero-emission vehicles?

A: It's our long-term goal. So again, we have to make sure with this new technology, we need to ensure that we have the reliability of whatever type of technology that we're piloting. There's now hybrid bus options that didn't exist when we first got our electric buses, there's full electric, there's more options than what we had before. And so I think, yes, that is our plan is to move toward a complete transition to a no- or low-emission fleet. And again, we just need to make sure the reliability is there. But all of our buses, we drive them for up to two decades until they get retired. Regardless, it'll be a slow process of turnover, every time when buses age out of production, we're certainly going to evaluate, what are the options? What is the right option for us to have? Do we need to still maintain some diesel buses so that we have flexibility in fuel with our fleet? So those are all things that we're working through, but we really would like to get to a point where we can have a full fleet of low- or no-emission vehicles that are reliable, that can go as far as our diesel buses. That's our vision for the future.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: The only thing that I'll maybe leave you with is that I think the hallmark of a great community is the ease with which people can move throughout the community by a variety of different modes, whether it's biking, walking, transit, by vehicle. It's been really great to see Iowa City kind of move the needle forward in terms of making non-automobile modes more viable for the community. Whether that's the bike master plan, the transit study we went through, or making more pedestrian friendly accommodations, to really transform Iowa City to a place where you don't so much need to have a vehicle to live here anymore. I think we are seeing a shift happening. And it's about continually finding ways to improve the ability to use these other modes of transportation besides the automobile. I think we're going to continue to see people make different choices in how they move about the community.

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