Fleming Says On Demand Buses Could Be A Bright Future For East End

A pilot program being run by Suffolk County Transit to provide “on-demand” bus service between Southampton Village and Sag Harbor shows promise as a possible solution to years of frustration with infrequent and inefficient bus service on the South Fork, Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming says.

The service, which started last summer as a one-year pilot with $400,000 in state funding support, has proven convenient for riders and more efficient for the bottom line of the county operations and has begun to attract new riders that had never used public buses before — young people in particular.

Fleming herself is a regular rider, using the bus to get from her home in Noyac to her legislative office in Sag Harbor (which moved to Southampton Village this week), a trip she used to make in her car, and says she’s proof first-hand how the bus service has been embraced by new riders.

The on-demand buses are hailed through a mobile phone app exactly like an Uber or Lyft ride would be.

A phone hotline can also be used by those who do not have a smartphone. The app shows how long it will be for the bus to arrive, indicates a pickup spot nearby and shows a location of the bus on a map — the latter a feature that many riders of the regular county bus routes have begged be made available across the network.

What the app doesn’t show is the price — which is always $2.25, regardless of destination.

On a recent afternoon, the county legislator invited a reporter along to see the bus system in action. Summoned from her living room up the street from Cromer’s Market, the app said the bus would arrive in just three minutes and would pick up the ride a couple of blocks down the side street from Noyac Road. Unlike the old static bus route, the on-demand buses will turn off the main route into side street neighborhoods, within reason, to meet riders closer to their homes or jobs.

The ride from Noyac to downtown Sag Harbor would cost each rider $2.25. The Uber app said the same ride at that moment would be $30.46 — plus tip.

The bus’s driver that afternoon, Timothy, was quick to offer to the legislator, who sits on the county’s transportation working group, that the top request he heard from riders was that they wished the service would be expanded to weekends. The legislator said that weekend service is a priority for the future expansion of the service, but is dependent on additional funding she has been lobbying for from New York State.

“I’d like to see weekends, but I’m worried about other cuts,” she said. “If they force us to be revenue neutral, I don’t know if we can do it.”

The county currently has a budget of about $41 million for its entire bus system. Fleming said that it needs to be upped to at least $48 million, and that boosting state support would be the key to raising that bar.

Consultants for the county have proposed cutting two more local swing routes in East Hampton and replacing them with on-demand services. Fleming said that the metrics show that, in addition to the added convenience for riders, the on-demand buses are more cost efficient to run than fixed routes that are not carrying people across most of their miles.

“In a municipal system, when we see those huge S-92 buses completely empty is horrifying,” she said. “This way it grows and shrinks depending on demand because it’s only moving around and burning gas when somebody needs it. The key question will be if it’s able to provide the capacity at the busier times.”

Timothy, the bus driver, also offered that local high school students had become regular riders since discovering the existence of the cheap shuttle. Some hailed it in the mornings in lieu of riding a school bus or getting a ride from a parent, others took it after school to get home from the gym or the SYS sports facilities.

Expanding the demographics of the bus ridership is both a critical component to its success, and a natural product of making the system more convenient.

The legislator shared two first-hand tales of riders that she has seen embrace the new bus service who would never have been able to rely on the old 10A.

“One day, I was driving on Noyac Road and it was pouring rain and there was a young man walking on the road and — I would never normally do this, but it was raining so hard bad, it was dangerous — so I gave him a ride,” Fleming recalled. “I had one of the fliers for the pilot and I showed it to him. A couple weeks later, I was riding the bus and he got on. He is taking it regularly now.

“Then, the next day, I was in Southampton Village at about 6 p.m. and this very well-dressed young lady got on — she was just going for drinks in Sag Harbor,” Fleming said on Friday afternoon. “My son just took it to the train station in Southampton.”

The on-demand service generally follows the route of the old 10A bus, which was discontinued in 2016, one of eight bus lines eliminated that year to save money. That bus ran a loop from Southampton Village, along Noyac Road, into downtown Sag Harbor, then to the Bridgehampton Commons and back to Southampton Village.

That bus was cut because it carried very few people over a long, gas-guzzling route. The new system seems to be bucking that trend already.

“What we need to do is rejuvenate ridership,” the legislator said. “That’s why I’ve been excited to see the diversity of people riding this bus. If more people take the bus because they choose to, not because they have to, then we’ll be able to generate more ridership and maybe it will be a system that really works for people.”