Juneau residents who ride Capital Transit buses to the airport, the University of Alaska Southeast and social service providers on Teal Street will need to find other means of transportation beginning Monday, April 22.
Last week, the city announced it would temporarily suspend routes 5 and 6, citing a shortage of drivers and maintenance workers.
Capital Transit Superintendent Rich Ross said they hope to restore service as soon as they can fill the positions. He said he hopes that can happen before July.
“Our maintenance team has been experiencing staffing shortages for nearly two years now, so a lot of it has more to do with the availability of running buses we have,” he said. “Out of the 18 buses, I’d say on a daily basis three to four of them are down for repairs.”
Route 5, called the University Connector, runs from the Valley Transit Center to Auke Bay and UAS. Route 6, called the Riverside/Airport Connector, has stops at the airport, Nugget Mall and Teal Street.
This isn’t the first time the routes have been suspended in recent years. Ross said they typically have the lowest ridership.
“The University of Alaska sees significantly reduced activity during the summer months, further decreasing demand for route five. Similarly, Route 6 hasn’t been super heavily utilized,” he said.
This summer the city plans to start a new “tripper bus” service to help handle the added demand during cruise season. It’s essentially an extra bus that would follow the buses that already go from downtown to the Mendenhall Valley near the glacier.
Ross said the worker shortages won’t stop that new service from happening, but it will scale it down.
“I think we’ll be able to make it happen — right now with our fleet size, we just can’t do what we want to do,” he said.
More information about the route suspensions — and job opportunities — can be found on Capital Transit’s website.
