At the end of the most recent budget cycle in both Albemarle County and Charlottesville, members of the group IMPACT demanded elected officials provide additional funding to Charlottesville Area Transit.
CAT Director Garland Williams had told them more drivers were necessary to implement long-awaited changes. Both the Albemarle Board of Supervisors and the Charlottesville City Council were able to provide some additional funding, but CAT’s budget didn’t quite cover the amount requested by IMPACT.
With nine months until the adoption of the next Charlottesville budget, Williams appeared before City Council with estimates of how much it would cost to get CAT up to full staff capacity.
“The city manager and the deputy city manager have been pushing CAT to make sure that we get as much information to you… so you can make a well-informed decision when it’s time before the actual budget process for FY27 starts,” Williams said.
Before he got to the numbers, Williams provided a lot of backstory for how CAT has been planning for changes to try to reverse ridership decline. There were 1.9 million riders in 2018 and that dropped due to the pandemic.
“Our ridership, like most transit agencies across the nation, plummeted during the pandemic,” Williams said. “We’ve been able to slowly start climbing our way back. We’re not at the FY19 levels, but we are higher than the FY2020 levels. We were hoping that the completion of FY25 was going to be 1.4. We fell just short of that.”
In May 2021, Charlottesville City Council was briefed on several route changes being planned for Charlottesville Area Transit. Those changes had not been made by October 2022 and I asked CAT director Garland Williams for an update.
“CAT doesn’t have enough operators to implement the proposed route enhancements presented to City Council last year,” Williams said for a story I wrote at the time.
In July 2023, work began on creating a “transit strategic plan” that incorporated many of the changes Williams referred to as a “system optimization plan.”
The firm Nelson Nygaard helped put together both the system optimization plan as well as the “transit strategic plan” that describes how route changes would be implemented in phases. The firm’s Jim Baker explained how much of the changes were intended to increase the efficiency of routes. Overall capacity would be increased by 40 percent by increasing to 28 buses and in May 2022, the plan called for a definite number of drivers.
“At the time, we estimated that the number of operators required to implement this system optimization plan was 82 operators,” Baker said.
With some additional drivers, CAT was able to implement some services last November including bringing Route 4 and Route 6 to 30-minute headways and bringing service to the Center at Belvedere for the first time.
As of July 21, CAT is authorized to have 66 drivers. Williams and Baker have now said a total of 90 drivers are be needed to fully implement that plan and restore Sunday service.
Baker said Nelson Nygaard was asked to readjust the plan to see what could be done with 82 drivers. Under the scenario shown to Council:
- Saturday service would be added to Route 1
- Route 2 would be broken into two separate routes
- Route 5 would extend south to the University of Virginia
- Route 7 would be extended north to the Wal-Mart
- Route 10 would have some modifications
- The trolley would run every 15 minutes
- Route 3 would be increased to 30 minute headways
Other items in the system optimization plan would not proceed under 82 drivers:
- Route 3 would not be split into two routes
- Route 6 would continue to go to UVA whereas the plan calls for that to end
- Additional service on the Route 7 would not proceed
- Route 8 would not be realigned to travel between Stonefield and Willoughby Shopping Center
- There would be no Sunday service at all
IMPACT also asked for all routes to be converted to 30 minute service. Baker presented another scenario that claimed that would take a total of 108 drivers on staff, not to mention additional buses.
In all, Baker and Williams presented six additional scenarios to Council. In all of them, more drivers also means more employees to serve as supervisors, mechanics, and other support positions.
- At the status quo of 66 drivers, annual operating costs for CAT are at $10,190,000 a year.
- The annual operating costs go up to $13,685,000 for 82 drivers.
- At 102 drivers, the annual operating cost is $18,220,000.
- The additional scenarios go up as high as $22,835,000 a year.
Williams said the information was presented to start the conversation and he did not expect any decisions.
City Councilor Michael Payne said he felt the city could find an additional $3 million to move to 82 drivers, but finding more might require finding another revenue source. At the very least, he said Council had a decision to make.
“To me the most important question is coming into this next budget cycle, do we identify transit as one of our top three priorities and commit to finding that two to three million dollars.” Payne said. “Historically we have not done that yet, but until we do that, progress will not happen.”
Council agreed to an increased budget for CAT in FY2026. In FY2022, CAT paid just under $6 million in total personnel costs. That figure has increased to nearly $10.4 million in FY2026.
The meeting was conducted by Vice Mayor Brian Pinkston because Mayor Juandiego Wade was absent for the second meeting in a row. Pinkston will not be on City Council during the next budget cycle because he was not renominated, but he urged his colleagues to keep additional funding sources in mind.
“One of the main reasons we stood up the [Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority] which has got a meeting on Thursday, is to hopefully to find another funding source to help us with this,” Pinkston said. “That’s really, I think, the larger strategic question that needs to be asked.”
Other than Pinkston’s mention, there was no reference to the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority. To learn more about what they’ll discuss on July 24, consult the most recent Week Ahead edition of this newsletter.
IMPACT responds
After sitting in on the work session, Alex Joyner, co-president of IMPACT and Pastor at Charlottesville First United Methodist Church, thanked Council for devoting time to the issue.
“A bus system is one part of a larger transportation network, but it is the backbone of our transit system,” Joyner said. “It is little d ‘democratic’ in that people of all types of income, ages and physical abilities can access it. It is an investment in our common good. It improves our common quality of life, affordability, traffic conditions and our overall economy.”
Joyner noted that Williams had called CAT’s current 68 percent on-time performance “abysmal” and said that means people miss doctor’s appointments, are late for work, and their groceries might spoil. He summarized what he had heard in the work session.
“What we heard this afternoon is that our system needs 90 drivers to get to the level of service identified in the 2022 SOP,” Joyner said. “It needs 108 to get to 30 minute wait times, expanded hours and Sunday service all when we have still not gotten to the pre pandemic levels of service.”
City Manager Sam Sanders said the next step is for a presentation to be given to the Finance Committee, a subsection of City Council with two members which allows for information to be kept from the public.
“The goal would be for you to have that information and with two of you being on the council, you’ll be able to dive in a little bit deeper and then we’ll help bring the other three members of council up to speed,” Sanders said.
Sanders said this will be one of the topics at the forthcoming City Council retreat to be held at the Wool Factory on August 15 and August 16. He also added there is a need to keep Albemarle County Supervisors in the loop.
“We have to take the county along with us,” Sanders said. “We have engaged them in conversations recently to make sure that they understand where things are going because I would appreciate them not being surprised the same as I do not enjoy a surprise.”
In the meantime, when was the last time you took a bus trip? Let’s have a conversation in the comments!
Before you go: This story was published in both the July 23, 2025 and July 24, 2025 editions of Charlottesville Community Engagement.
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Every week I ride my bike to a community center downtown and take the bus home. The bus is great because it cuts the length I have to bike in half, and helps my avoid riding after dark, which is safer for me. It gives me the opportunity to meet and talk to people, and unlike driving or biking, I can read a book or look at my phone while I’m riding.
My only complaint is that like Williams says, on time performance is not at all good. If we really want to get more people riding the bus(which we have to do for the climate, road safety, and economic equity) we have to make it both better and faster than driving a car.
More bus drivers is good but won’t stop buses from getting stuck in traffic. The city could solve the on time performance problem by giving buses traffic light priority, and if they were really serious then give them dedicated lanes(this is called Bus Rapid Transit). Riding the bus is already cheaper than driving a car, if you make it faster too, ridership will explode.