TriMet faces driver shortage as it looks to rebuild from pandemic

Cherry blossoms rest on the ground at a TriMet bus stop located at SE 32nd and Holgate Blvd. in Portland, Ore., Sunday, April 25, 2021.
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As the pandemic took hold of Portland in 2020, TriMet was hit hard: the metro-area transit agency saw a nearly 70% drop in ridership as people began working from home and Oregon faced a lockdown for the coronavirus.

But even as ridership slowly ticks upward, agency leaders have seen a shortage of workers joining the company — a problem they haven’t historically had.

Since March 2020, the transit agency has hired 445 workers, including 115 bus operators.

From August 2020 to 2021, 145 bus operators resigned or retired, according to TriMet. In 2019, 152 bus, rail and streetcar operators resigned or retired.

The transit agency couldn’t immediately provide hiring numbers for previous years, but TriMet spokesperson Roberta Altstadt said the current staffing situation leaves them short 27 bus operators, and with about 40 bus maintenance positions open, as well as openings for about two dozen other job categories across various departments.

Since the beginning of 2021, the agency has trained 99 bus operators. Altstadt said the rest of the operators who were hired are still in training. With a capacity of 26 people per training class, they could have trained up to 260 this year.

The agency attributed the workforce shortage in large part to fallout from the pandemic. They limited hiring in spring of 2020, only hiring for safety positions and jobs deemed critical to the agency’s operations.

TriMet had seen a dip in ridership even before March of 2020, as many transit agencies around the nation grappled with congestion, ride-hailing companies and other urban issues. But the numbers dropped even more sharply when the pandemic shut down Portland.

Even with lower ridership, the shortage of workers — especially bus operators — translates to more missed bus routes for riders.

Altstadt said when the agency does have to cancel bus rides due to the worker shortage, they prioritize low-ridership lines that don’t predominantly serve low-wage workers or people of color. She added that they are offering extra work to bus operators, especially part-time employees, to help mitigate the shortages.

Altstadt said they’ve now begun a large hiring push to find more workers, which includes reaching out to groups they don’t usually target. In addition to hosting a hiring fair at the Convention Center recently and posting ads for job opportunities on social media, Altstadt said they’ve also been recruiting at military bases — a new endeavor for the agency.

“Everybody’s competing for workers,” Altstadt said. “With all these jobs open and more openings than people stepping in to fill them, that’s definitely having an impact.”

Altstadt noted that while a commercial driver license is a requirement, the transit agency has to be more selective.

“We can’t just bring in anyone who has a CDL or knows how to drive a big rig,” she said. “With that focus it can limit who would be a successful candidate. We have great trainers who can teach folks how to drive big buses. But having that customer service lens is a little bit harder to train.”

Bill Bradley, an executive board member with Amalgamated Transit Union 757, the union that represents about 2,700 TriMet workers, said the strain of assaults on bus operators and potential exposure to COVID-19 has driven some to look for different work. Commercial Driver Licenses have become increasingly valuable during the pandemic as people work from home and rely more heavily on deliveries.

That shift means TriMet needs to look at its compensation packages, and make their offers more competitive, he said.

“Whether a brown truck, a white truck, food delivery, fuel delivery — people take their CDLs and are able to earn more money elsewhere,” he said.

Bradley also cited riskier conditions for operators and other employees.

“It’s a pretty stressful environment,” he said. “To be operating a bus and coming into contact with hundreds or thousands of people a day — and we’re seeing an increase in assaults. So we have to do a better job of making people feel safe from an operator and passenger perspective.”

According to data collected by the union, assaults on operators have increased since the pandemic began, from about 0.41 per 100,000 rides to about 1.75 assaults per 100,000 rides. In the first nine months of the pandemic, ridership ranged from 2.5 million to 3.6 million rides per month on buses and MAX trains.

Altstadt said TriMet does not track criminal assaults, but does record the combined number of physical and verbal assaults. The latter is not considered a criminal assault.

In 2019, TriMet began installing protective barriers to about 42% of its fleet to deflect assaults on bus operators. Due to COVID-19, they installed panels on all buses before the end of September 2020.

Bradley said union workers also worry that the drop in new applicants is in part driven by changes to TriMet’s apprenticeship program, which he said provided growth opportunities within the company.

In April, TriMet and the labor union reached an agreement after a year and a half of bargaining. One point of contention during negotiations was the union’s dissatisfaction with TriMet’s plan to eliminate the apprenticeship program. The two groups eventually reached a compromise, with TriMet agreeing to retool the bus maintenance apprenticeship program. Other portions of the program, like rail maintenance, were replaced with entry-level training programs.

Bradley said the smaller pool of apprentices means TriMet has to hire more external candidates.

“We had service workers who worked at TriMet in alternate shifts — their work ethic, willingness to show up in the middle of the night, clean buses, their willingness to move up by putting in work at a mechanical level — you know what you’re getting when you hire internally,” he said.

Altstadt said TriMet doesn’t attribute worker shortages to the apprenticeship program changes. She said it didn’t produce the number of full-time staff that the agency had hoped for.

“When you’re doing an apprenticeship program, much of their time is spent on training, not doing the repairs and maintenance,” she said, “so how do you get all that work done while you’re trying to bring people up.”

Altstadt said as they work on recruiting more employees, they continue to prioritize internal candidates, and hope to hire more limited-term cleaners, brought on during the pandemic, to permanent positions.

—Jayati Ramakrishnan; 503-221-4320; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com; @JRamakrishnanOR

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