u/Imaginary_Dinner_813

So I have a trip I need to take on the bus using a less frequent route and so I checked the canceled trips schedule since I’ve been burned before.

What I found led me to believe Met Council needs to clean up its contracts like MVTA is apparently working to do. According to the Rider Alerts ( https://www.metrotransit.org/rider-alerts )
as of 12:30pm today, it looks like there are 33 canceled trips, 30 of which are operated by Transdev and the other two by Metro Transit.

Route- number of trips canceled
A Line - 1 trip
30 - 8 trips, what appears to be an entire driver shift
72- 8 trips, what appears to be a whole driver shift
721 - 2 trips, sequential
802 - 7 trips, appears to be entire driver shift
805 - 7 trips, appears to be entire driver shift

Obviously there are good people who work everywhere but this is crazy. Metro, who is responsible for many more trips, has just three canceled, apparently due to mechanical problems and traffic but following trips will be done, and then you have what looks like four full-time work shifts uncovered on a Tuesday. How does this happen? Or, is part of the “contract-out” strategy to limit how many standby drivers they pay for so if a few drivers get sick, by design, trips are missed? Do they still get paid for these missed trips? Should we really be contracting out some of this stuff?

I guess I’m lucky because the route I need to ride has not been canceled (yet) but clearly many people across the 30’ routes aren’t as lucky.

Metro Transit plans to replace most of Route 3A with H Line, and extend it along Maryland to White Bear Ave and then down to Sun Ray Center to replace portions of routes 64 and 80. As part of this, trip count would at least double in a low-ridership area by Como Park (since the H Line would run more often than all of Route 3, and a little less than half of Route 3 trips go through this 3A area). Residents are angry. Is this another area (like Kenilworth) where officials are going to insist on putting transit where it is not wanted instead of by existing low-income and senior housing, in this case on Front Avenue on existing 3B? Are these people out of their mind?