Shortages of bus drivers, train operators and some other key workers at the Regional Transportation District are just as large or worse than they were before a new union contract last year significantly raised wages, along with hopes for a turnaround.
The metro Denver transit agency was short 184 bus drivers as of last month — a 19% vacancy rate that’s improved since last summer, but is still slightly higher than it was in January 2022, according to RTD employment data. RTD has backslid when it comes to light rail train operators, with vacancies in that position growing from 8% to 19% since early last year.
And while some maintenance, technician and service categories have notched big improvements, others still are stuck with 30% or more of jobs empty.
RTD leaders point to an encouraging surge in applications after it began offering $4,000 hiring bonuses and the new union contract initially boosted wages at least 16%, with more raises to come. Total hiring more than doubled last year compared to 2021, helping to reduce or even eliminate some job vacancies in both union and non-union positions.
But a Denver Post review found that high turnover — while lower than it was during the pandemic — still undercuts those gains to a startling degree. Departures have averaged one employee every single day, skewed heavily toward newer employees who burn out quickly or violate RTD’s rules.
The numbers and cross-currents, including hiring challenges faced by transit agencies across the country, show that RTD, at best, is just beginning to get a handle on staffing problems that have hurt the reliability of its bus and train service.
As a ray of hope, RTD’s general manager and CEO, Debra Johnson, has publicly touted that hiring finally outpaced departures last year, reversing the trend of several prior years. She told the agency’s elected board in January that “we basically netted an additional 307 employees in 2022,” the difference between 708 people hired and 401 who “separated” from the agency.
But that overstated the actual gain in new employees, since the hiring figure included many internal hires and promotions that left other jobs vacant. On Friday, the human resources department provided figures to The Post showing that the agency’s total headcount actually increased by 107 from Jan. 1, 2022, to Jan. 1, 2023 — about a third of the number Johnson cited. RTD began the year with 2,595 employees.
That headcount increase disproportionately occurred in non-union jobs. Among the skilled and front-line positions represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001 — about two-thirds of RTD’s jobs — the net increase was 47.
“We are now at a point where we would qualify ourselves as being in a recovery mode,” Johnson told the board in January, before acknowledging: “But with that as a backdrop, we still have quite a few vacancies.”
Nearly 550, in fact, out of nearly 3,200 budgeted full- and part-time positions, as of this spring, which reflected some additional hiring since the start of the year.
Charlene Polege, RTD’s chief people officer, underlined Johnson’s use of the word “recovery” on Friday, making a distinction between that and larger increases that would mean RTD’s staffing is growing more robustly.
Separate from its workforce, RTD also relies on roughly 1,300 workers employed through contracted service providers — including at least one that has shortages and has continued to require overtime work for some of its bus drivers, a practice RTD stopped in 2020.
A three-part Post series published in early 2022 showed that RTD’s severe staffing shortages, while reflective of industrywide trends that predated the COVID-19 pandemic, posed its greatest challenge to restoring pandemic-induced bus and train service cuts. Many of those cuts remain in place while ridership — now above 60% of pre-pandemic levels — slowly recovers.
Nearly 18 months later, operator shortages continue to be a leading culprit for regular cancellations of bus and train trips, though an improving picture in the bus division has enabled small service restorations, particularly on regional routes. Persistent staffing gaps mean maintenance and repair crews are stretched thin — prompting RTD this month to put a disruptive southeast light rail corridor retaining wall project on hold for more than a week so that it could respond to a need for emergency signal repairs at R-Line street crossings in Aurora.
“I think there’s work to do,” Dave Jensen, RTD’s assistant general manager of rail operations, said in an interview, citing the difficulties of attracting and retaining new employees while dealing with an aging transit workforce. “We understand the business we’re in and we’re really trying to make it attractive to employees to come — and stay. But it’s a challenge … and the whole world is going through it right now.
“I just got back from a rail conference in Pittsburgh, and everybody’s talking about the same thing.”
Hyoung Chang, JS
RTD Light rail’s W line arrives at Union Station in Denver on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, during the monthlong Zero Fair for Better Air promotion.
Riders “will continue to pay the price” for shortages
Impatience has been growing among transit advocates.
In late May, when RTD shut down major segments of the D, E and H light-rail lines for three days to replace overhead wires, the Denver Streets Partnership blasted the agency’s inability — because of short staffing — to run bus shuttles in the closed sections, leaving thousands of riders to figure out alternatives.
“Transit riders need leaders at the local, regional and state levels working together to address” the agency’s insufficient workforce, said Molly McKinley, the group’s policy director. “Until then, people who rely most on public transit will continue to pay the price when our region’s buses and trains fail to meet their needs and expectations.”
The reality is a cold splash of water on the optimism that greeted RTD’s new contract with ATU Local 1001, ratified in March 2022. The three-year deal included retroactive boosts in 2022 of 16% or more to hourly wages across more than 2,100 union-covered positions. Subsequent annual increases will push the contract’s cumulative raises to 25% by early 2024.
That contract wasn’t seen as a cure-all for longstanding workforce shortages. But officials said the wage increases gave managers a vital new tool in the fierce competition with other industries for drivers and skilled workers.
After another 4% increase kicked in this year, train operator and bus driver jobs start at nearly $24.96 an hour, and mechanics start at $31.46 an hour.
As Polege put it during a board committee update in March, those raises made the agency “market-competitive” — though not a “leader” compared to private employers and other organizations that RTD competes with fiercely for drivers, mechanics and other workers. So far this year, she said recently, applications have been up more than 1,000 compared to the same point in 2022.
“I think it’s helped, but the compensation is just a small piece of this,” cautioned Fred Worthen, the assistant general manager over the bus division, in an interview.
Worthen’s staff of bus operators fell to a recent low of 750, about 10% of them working part-time, in May 2022, according to monthly staffing reports provided to RTD’s board. But as hiring increased, new employees began to outpace retirements and other departures, and the driver staff grew to 771 in December. It’s since dropped slightly, to 764 as of May.
Worthen credits the measured progress not only to the raises but the end of mandated overtime and changes to training in recent years. That includes a recognition that 60% of trainees now lack commercial driver’s licenses, so training has expanded to offer that. He’s also tasked new lead division supervisors with checking in frequently with new drivers during their first 18 months on the job, support that’s more intensive and longer lasting than what new hires used to receive.
He took umbrage at McKinley’s call for more urgency.
“I’ll just put it nicely: I take offense to the comment,” Worthen said. “I’ve been doing this for 37 years — this is my livelihood. Do you think I like seeing buses sitting idle? No, I don’t. I’m doing everything I can to put people in a seat. And the truth of the matter is … the agency was focused on building for a long time and they let the infrastructure go,” resulting in the recent pile-up of deferred maintenance projects that are affecting service.
He said turnover in his division used to be at roughly 30% annually when he arrived at RTD in 2018. That figure reflects both departures and promotions that leave positions open.
“We’re down to 12 to 15% turnover right now,” he said.
Division administrators have reached out to applicants to reduce the response time of RTD’s overloaded human resources staff, he said.
But some of Worthen’s assertions sparked pushback from Lance Longenbohn, the president of ATU Local 1001, who said it still can take weeks for applicants to hear back from RTD. He also voiced complaints about “toxic management” and said he’d complained to RTD brass about the new lead bus supervisors’ purported habit of offering criticism to new employees, diluting any support benefit.
“That’s one of the challenges of this agency — even if they want to do the right thing, they don’t know how to do the right thing,” Longenbohn said.
![Commuters bound for Boulder board a RTD Flatiron Flyer bus](https://i0.wp.com/www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/TDP-L-RTD_COMMUTERS_111x.jpg?fit=620%2C9999px&ssl=1)
Eric Lutzens, JS
Commuters bound for Boulder board a RTD Flatiron Flyer bus in the underground bus concourse at Union Station in downtown Denver on Wednesday, July 21, 2021. (Photo by Eric Lutzens/JS)
Light rail struggles to stem losses among operators
Jensen, the rail division’s head, views the staffing challenge as a long game, driven by the imperative of selecting the right candidates suited for demanding jobs, whether in the shops or in the cabs of trains.
But he’s got a problem: The pandemic years brought an exodus of light-rail operators — on the D, E, H, L, R and W lines — with dozens retiring or leaving despite the end of required overtime, resulting in total operators dwindling to 154 last month. Those trains have also seen open drug use and other security problems that have made the job more stressful in recent years, and the tight staffing means Jensen lacks backup staffing to cover absences.
Most of RTD’s commuter-rail lines (the A, B and G lines) are operated by Denver Transit Partners, an outside contractor with a long-term partnership contract. But the N-Line, operated in-house, has lowered its vacancy rate for engineers (who operate those heavier trains) from 25% to 13% since early last year. It’s also hired a new corps of about two dozen conductors to serve as second crew members on the trains, checking fares.
The commuter-rail lines have seen recurring cancellations less because of operator vacancies than shortages in contracted security officers who serve as the federally required second crew member on DTP-operated trains.
But Allied Universal Security Services has performed better this year, according to Steve Martingano, RTD’s deputy police chief, because of a hiring surge and better scheduling management. It’s also no longer required to provide armed officers on trains. RTD has fined Allied nearly $700,000 for missed shifts since August 2021, but the size of those fines has fallen considerably in recent months, to just $2,000 in May, RTD records show.
In Jensen’s rail division, turnover has decreased from 31% last year to 25% this year so far, he said. But the work environment and seniority-based challenges remain hurdles to keeping new light-rail operators, who tend to work nights, weekends and holidays, making it difficult to build “a sense of belonging.”
“That’s where we’re really struggling,” he said.
With nearly 1 in 5 positions open for both light rail and bus operators, employees are working significant overtime, though voluntarily — extra money that Longenbohn says has been valuable for those interested.
RTD records show it paid out $7 million in overtime to bus drivers and train operators during the first five months of this year. That is outpacing all of the previous five years, though officials say higher pay rates and overtime incentives — operators receive double-time pay now — have driven up the total. Last year, the final tab for operator overtime was $13.9 million.
“Still challenging” as pandemic effects fade
Ann Rajewski, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies, says other providers in Colorado share RTD’s struggles, from those in cities to small systems in mountain resort towns that face even starker cost-of-living problems.
“We have some transit agencies that contract with national-level firms to provide the operations of their services,” she said. “And some of these organizations, just over the last winter in resort areas, have had to fly drivers in from somewhere else during the week.”
But she sees the staffing picture improving as transit agencies have increased pay rates and, in some cases, worked to find employees housing. That’s helped them compete for workers with delivery and trucking companies that offer similar work without having to interact so directly with customers.
“We’re one or two years out now from the worst of COVID, but it’s still challenging,” Rajewski said. “It’s a little less concerning now than it was.”
RTD officials voiced optimism that the agency’s nascent staffing recovery would continue.
But they have a steep hill to climb: Given turnover, Polege and Johnson, RTD’s CEO, both have said that filling nearly 550 open jobs within just one year would require hiring roughly 950 people, or nearly 80 per month, to close all gaps.
In other words, it’s likely will take RTD several years to overcome the shortages — if its leaders can find the right strategies.
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