The Butte County Association of Governments opened its official Unmet Transit Needs Process comment period, allowing the community to give input on unmet needs with the county’s public transportation system.

The process happens yearly, and Transportation Analyst Victoria Proctor said it is required since BCAG is the county’s administrator of California Transportation Development Act funds. The Transportation Development Act was passed in 1971, which gave a percentage of sales tax funds to organizations like BCAG for public transit. However, she said, not all the funds would need to go towards public transit.

“They (the state) created a list of rules and requirements, so that if there’s no unmet needs for public transit in an area, then cities and counties can then spend that money on streets and roads improvements like bikeways and pedestrian features, things like that,” Proctor said. “So the unmet transit needs process is the formalized process that the state asks us to do once a year to double check that there are no unmet need that are reasonable to meet.”

The Unmet Transit Needs process is specific to fixed route service, so things like B- Line Flex aren’t included. Proctor said needs like new lines or stops are included, though she said issues like increased headways — like increasing Route 20 from Chico to Oroville to hourly instead of every two hours — is treated as an operational issue and isn’t included. However, the Route 20 headway will be looked at in BCAG’s Chico-Oroville Transit Study.

She also said the needs have to be “reasonable to meet,” and BCAG created a formal definition of what falls under “reasonable.”

The first criteria is cost effectiveness, which is the cost to provide the service will meet the minimum farebox recovery ratio. Proctor said the farebox recovery ratio is the measure of the fraction of a public transit’s system’s operating expenses that are paid directly by passenger fares. For B-Line, the ratio is 15.6% — solidly in between California urban minimum of 20% and rural minimum of 10%. Proctor said the ratio is a blend between Chico — an urbanized area — and the rest of the county, considered rural.

“The routes in Chico and the routes in Oroville and the rest of the county feed together to create that ratio,” she said. “So the state says if you don’t meet that (farebox recovery ratio), if you cannot show that people are going to use your system, then we will not give you these funds. You have to show some level of efficiency and local buy-in to the public transit system.”

The second criteria is economy, looking at if a project can be implemented at a reasonable cost. The third criteria is community acceptance, which is the existing support of a specific need. This criteria is found through the public hearing process. Proctor gave direct service to Vallombrosa Avenue as an example of a need that doesn’t have community acceptance, which also ties into the last criteria, which is operational feasibility — if the service is safe to operate.

“We don’t currently go down Vallombrosa (Avenue). We go down East First (Avenue), East Eight (Avenue) and East Ninth (Avenue),” she said. “So we could say, yeah, that’s an unmet need, but it’s unreasonable to meet because the homeowners along Vallombrosa, those house owners do not want to see a bus stop that is right in front of their house. It would also be unreasonable to meet because there’s no safe shoulder for a bus to pull off to actually put a bus stop on Vallombrosa.”

Another recurring request that Proctor pointed to — that is not considered reasonable — is increased service on Sundays. She said that while BCAG acknowledges it as an unmet need, Sunday ridership is less than 1% of weekday ridership, making it difficult to meet the farebox recovery threshold.

While people can send in comments throughout the year, BCAG is required to have a formal 30-45 day comment period, which culminates in a public hearing at 9 a.m. Dec. 10 at the BCAG Board Room, located at 326 Huss Drive Building E in Chico. The hearing can also be attended through Zoom, which can be found at bcag.org/board-meetings. The link will be posted on Dec. 1.

Along with the public hearing, people can also submit comments through multiple different avenues. Proctor said people email BCAG at [email protected], email Amy White at [email protected], call BCAG at 530-809-4616, or fill out a comment card on BCAG’s website under the “contact us” section.

All comments made up until the hearing on Dec. 10 will be compiled into a document called the “Transit Needs Assessment, which will then be reviewed by the Social Services Transportation Advisory Council in January or early February. Following the review, the report will be brought back to the BCAG Board of Directors for approval. The board can make one of three decisions: there are no unmet transit needs, there are no unmet transit needs that are reasonable to meet or there are unmet transit needs.

If the board finds that there are unmet transit needs that are reasonable to do, it must be met before any Transportation Development Act funds can be given to cities or the county for non-transit purposes.

Unmet transit needs are required to be looked at yearly, and Proctor said there have been changes to the B-Line system because of it. She pointed to the addition of Route 52 in Chico, which brought bus service to the Chico Regional Airport, as several businesses had moved in around the airport and people needed a way to get there. The service was phased out, however, as Proctor said many of the businesses eventually moved out and the route had very low ridership.

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