There are around nine miles between Arcata and Eureka, and there’s a lot of highway beyond both. For people without a car or with disabilities, covering the distances between Humboldt’s far-flung towns can be an insurmountable task without public transportation. 

At recent public meetings around the county, the floor was open to members of the public who had “unmet transit needs” to share with local policymakers, who then passed them on to the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG). None of the Humboldt Transit Authority’s (HTA) buses run on Sundays and none of the Arcata & Mad River Transit System’s make it out to Bayside, two inconveniences that affected many of the commenters at Arcata’s unmet needs hearing on Nov. 19. 

So why don’t they? — a simple question with several answers. 

HCAOG’s associate regional planner Stephen Luther told the Outpost in an interview that they’d looked into Bayside service after many requests from community members, digging into census tract and transportation data. According to the 2020 census, there are roughly 1,800 residents in Bayside; six of them took the bus to work. HCAOG concluded that it wasn’t feasible because its population density isn’t high enough to justify the cost. Stops on the Red and Orange routes near the Murphy’s in Sunny Brae average around 30 people daily getting on and off there; Luther estimated adding stops deeper into Bayside would increase that by single digits. 

“In terms of regular commuters that would be commuting into Arcata,” Luther said, “It was pretty low.”

According to last year’s unmet needs summary, buses used to run to Bayside “some time ago,” but that ended because so few people used it. HCAOG’s staff asked HTA if they could extend the Red line down Old Arcata Road to Bayside Corners; HTA said it’d add 8 minutes to the loop and couldn’t be done. In 2016, HTA added bus service down Old Arcata Road. Within two years, it was discontinued for the same reason.

Buses may one day run again to Bayside when the Roger’s Garage low-income housing project is constructed, according to the summary. But for the time being, it’s simply too expensive. 

The same goes for Sunday bus routes. The big number: it’d cost about $600,000 annually to fund the route on Highway 101 called the Redwood Transit System (RTS), $200,000 from operating costs, like maintenance and fuel, and the rest from the five new people HTA would have to hire to keep operations running another day of the week. 

HTA used to run buses on Sundays, but declining use during the pandemic killed it. 

An estimated 237 people would use the service every Sunday. With the standard $2 rider fare, that means it’d run HTA about $15 every time someone rode the bus (what HTA calls their “operating subsidy”). It’d put that program deep in the red. 

HTA’s deputy general manager Katie Collender told the Outpost they’re looking for an operating subsidy closer to $3 a rider.

Consultants for HTA also recommended that if RTS Sunday service started, the intra-city bus routes should also run on Sunday. Funding that would be another huge expense HTA can’t meet: $95,000 for Eureka and another $67,000 for Arcata (even when only running the Orange route).

“Bottom line and big picture, we’d love to have Sunday service,” Luther said. “We recognize it as an unmet need that does need to be filled. There are a lot of people that comment on this process that need the bus to get to work on Sundays. Who maybe work later in the evenings at a restaurant and rely on the bus to get home, but it doesn’t run late enough in the night. So there are many of these transit needs that we hear, year after year, that are just super challenging to implement.”

He said there was a “tension” between bus coverage and bus frequency; it’s expensive to add both at the same time. 

“You really can’t have everything,” Luther continued a few minutes later. “We have a limited amount of funding. HTA does everything they can to get as many dollars as they can, to make it stretch as far as they can … If HTA can start a service and operate it, they’re going to.”