Hampton Roads Transit outlines plan to shrink low‑ridership routes, expand microtransit and backbone service

Hampton Roads Transit officials told Newport News City Council on Oct. 14 that a draft System Optimization Plan (SOP) would reduce low‑ridership local bus service and reinvest the saved operator time and city funding into higher‑demand routes and microtransit zones.

Ray Amorusso, HRT chief planning and development officer, said the plan responds to chronic operator shortages and aims to improve reliability by ‘‘right sizing the bus network to match the bus operator resources.’’ He said HRT is running 68 bus routes and that in June the system missed about 1,200 trips because of a lack of bus operators. Amorusso said the agency is short about 50 operators to return to pre‑pandemic service levels and needs an additional roughly 45 operators to fully implement the regional backbone of high‑frequency routes.

The SOP seeks to reduce service on underperforming local routes — some carrying about three passengers per hour on hourly schedules — and redeploy those resources. Amorusso said HRT’s operating cost per passenger on the local average benchmark is about $19.63 and that…