In May, PSTA claimed that its new Sunrunner bus “is designed to meet the demands of work commuters and attract tourists and new riders into PSTA’s comprehensive transit system.” PSTA is now backpedaling, perhaps due…
Three years ago, the Tampa Bay Times reported that “studies of the [Sunrunner] route connecting downtown St. Petersburg with the beaches estimate it would have 4,500 daily rides.” On June 2nd this year, PSTA told…
“The bus will leave when I’m finished cleaning,” the PSTA driver told the Tampa Bay Guardian reporter. We repeated our question: what is the scheduled departure time? “It’s hard to keep the schedule,” the driver…
PSTA staff have provided its board with inflated year to date bus ridership data two months in a row. Seven months in to its current fiscal year, PSTA’s official report for April shows a 52%…
On March 19th, PSTA decided to waive bus fares on its network due to the Wuhan virus pandemic. Despite its service now being 100% free, records show that PSTA’s ridership still dropped by 43.2% from…
Neither recently fired HART CEO Ben Limmer or current PSTA CEO Brad Miller ever submitted employment applications for their jobs, public records obtained by The Guardian show. All other employees, including the lowest paid ones,…
At PSTA’s Legislative Committee meeting on February 5th, PSTA’s federal lobbyist Harry Glenn spoke of a list that the FTA has. “It’s actually a list of projects…that kind of gives the Congress an expectation of…
At yesterday’s monthly PSTA board meeting, Pinellas County commissioner Pat Gerard somewhat surprisingly commented that “riding the [PSTA ] buses all the time, you see what kinds of things they [the bus drivers] deal with…
The agenda for PSTA’s October board meeting was packed with costly surprises for the taxpayers. There was a half million dollar cost overrun that went undetected for three years, the revelation that 56% of PSTA’s…
PSTA’s Central Avenue Bus Rapid Transit (CABRT) project has received another setback. The project will not be funded in the federal FY2020 budget. That information reached PSTA in March, yet no mention of it was…
The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA) is once again attracting negative press. The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that PSTA misled the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) about local financial support for the so-called Central…
In its fiscal year which ended September 30th, so-called revenue passenger trips on PSTA’s network of buses dropped 4.5% compared to the previous year. PSTA’s ridership is thus now 13% lower than it was 10…
In the past six months, the Guardian has reported on PSTA’s plummeting ridership and its declining farebox recovery, We’ve also reported on PSTA’s increased reliance on free parking shuttles and free special events shuttles to boost ridership. PSTA’s soluiton? …
The mood was somber at the Finance Committee meeting at PSTA headquarters on January 18th. As the Guardian previously reported, ridership in the just completed fiscal year is down 15% in two years. The plunge continues…
PSTA’s 2017 fiscal year (FY17) ended with a whimper on September 30th. In one year, ridership declined 7%, passenger revenue declined 10%, and the number of so-called “Transportation Disadvantaged” (TD) riders rose 26%. To call TD…
At today’s monthly PSTA board meeting, a flawed resolution that was “approved in form” by its top attorney was before the board for approval. The flawed resolution passed unanimously, as written. As explained below, there…
The decline of bus ridership on the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA) network of routes continues, despite new programs aimed at boosting ridership. At the current rate, PSTA is headed for its lowest total number of bus revenue…
Only after a query from the Guardian did PSTA post its full-year ridership data on its website Monday. The data showed a decline of 10.2% in total passenger trips compared to its previous fiscal year. This…
