Maitland commuter bus flounders without funding

Buses transporting commuters from the Maitland SunRail Station to Maitland Center could run out of gas next month if a funding source can’t be found to continue the service.

Funding for the first year of pilot program of the Maitland Neighborlink bus service, operated by LYNX, is funded through Dec. 15 by a split payment agreement between the Florida Department of Transportation and Orange County. With less than a month to go, no final funding plan for 2016 has been inked.

This has riders of the service worried over how they will get to work if the service stalls. Chris Carson of Lake Mary started a petition on Change.org last month collecting signatures in support of continuing the service.

“Without this connection, not only will SunRail ridership go down, but many employees currently utilizing the service will have to make dramatic changes after becoming comfortable with SunRail,” he wrote on the petition.

The petition has garnered 38 signatures so far. That’s more than the number of people who, on average, have ridden the shuttle daily since it launched last December, according to ridership figures from LYNX.

Between November 2014 – the Maitland line’s first full month of service – and September of this year, an average of 25.1 people used the shuttle daily. That’s below average when compared to other Neighborlink lines that also run service only Monday through Friday, but the Maitland line also runs on the most limited time schedule of the comparable lines.

The Maitland shuttle runs only six times a day, three times in the morning and three times in the evening, compared to other lines such as the Intercession City/Campbell City route that runs from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. and averaged only 19.3 riders a day during the same time frame. LYNX said overall when you break it down by average ridership by service hour, that the Maitland line preforms roughly 25 percent better than the system-wide average for Neighborlink routes.

“We’d like to see it continue. It’s been a successful route,” said Matt Friedman, director of marketing communications for LYNX. “[The Maitland line] runs as a commuter connection and meets its purpose.”

LYNX committed to continuing to operate the Maitland service through 2016 at its board meeting last week. Friedman said it’s now all up to local partners to come up with the money to fund it.

“If they fund it, we’ll run it,” he said.

Before the LYNX board voted to continue Maitland service at it’s meeting Nov. 12, the Maitland City Council considered sweetening the deal for LYNX by putting forth a contribution of $26,600 – one third of the line’s operating cost – to help keep the line running.

But City Council members decided against agreeing to the funding, despite being in favor of continuing the service.

“We have no intention of being the only city in Central Florida that pays for our link in addition to our taxes while the rest of the cities don’t,” Councilman Ivan Valdes said at the meeting. “We don’t want special treatment, but we also don’t want to be singled out as the rich uncle who just has extra money.”

Maitland Mayor Dale McDonald said he’s hopeful that outside funding for the line will come through, but he said, “Something’s going to have to happen fairly quickly.”

Doreen Overstreet, public information officer for Orange County government, said the county hasn’t made a decision on whether it will continue to contribute funds to keep the Maitland line rolling, but will make that decision in the next couple weeks.

Steve Olson, public information manager for FDOT, said FDOT has agreed to match its contribution of 50 percent of the Maitland line’s operating cost at $39,059 for 2016, but is waiting to see if Orange County or another partner will step up to match the remaining cost before executing the contract.

Maitland’s SunRail Station has continually ranked among the lowest in ridership numbers since the commuter rail system started last May.

In September 2015, the Maitland station ranked in next to last in total ridership numbers with 3,435 people hopping on board from the station. That’s compared to 4,811 riders getting on one stop to the north in Altamonte Springs, and 6,184 boarding one-stop south in Winter Park.

Maitland city officials have long argued that one of the keys to boosting ridership at their station is to provide a direct link for commuters between the station and the city’s largest office complex, Maitland Center, which sits 3 miles west of the station.

That link was originally supposed to be covered by FlexBus, an on-demand bus service that Maitland and three other local cities planned to launch in concurrence with SunRail. But after continual sputters felled the system, Mayor McDonald deemed the system “dead in the water” this August.

That leaves the Neighborlink service as the only available link for Maitland Center commuters looking to ride SunRail to work.

“It’s the best fill in, as opposed to nothing, that we can reasonably expect,” McDonald said.

Many of those 38 people who’ve signed the Change.org petition to keep funding the Maitland Neighborlink line said there’s no way that they could continue riding SunRail to work without it.

“Without this shuttle between the Maitland SunRail station and Maitland Center, I would not be able to take SunRail to work,” Mary Ross, of Orlando, wrote on the petition. “I believe that using SunRail is the right thing to do and I would hate to have to give it up and go back to driving to work every day.”