The Greater Lynchburg Transit Company’s board of directors will vote at their monthly meeting on Wednesday on whether to suspend Sunday bus service in response to an ongoing shortage of bus drivers.
The meeting will be held at 8:30 a.m. in the GLTC Transfer Station on Kemper Street. Chris Poindexter, marketing manager for GLTC, said he encourages residents to attend and share their ideas for creative solutions to the problem. The board has already collected comments through voicemails, emails and five public hearings conducted since the end of January, he said.
Josh Moore, GLTC’s general manager, said in January that GLTC needs 42 bus operators to fully staff its fixed-route bus services. Right now, it has 33, leaving about a 20% vacancy rate. When vacation and sick days are factored in, Moore said, there aren’t enough drivers to provide reliable service on every route.
GLTC currently operates 14 bus routes within Lynchburg and a portion of Madison Heights seven days a week. Throughout the winter, Moore said he occasionally had to cancel routes at the last minute because he didn’t have enough drivers on the schedule. That’s when GLTC leaders began to consider suspending Sunday routes in order to have more predictable service on every other day of the week.
Sunday is the day with the lowest ridership, and so ending its service would cause the least disruption to the community, said Ben Blanks, treasurer of GLTC’s board. The system sees an average of about 2,400 riders each weekday, 1,600 each Saturday, and between 800 and 900 each Sunday, he said.
Blanks added that GLTC had no Sunday service from 2012 to 2020, so board members have a precedent to look back to when they consider suspending the service this time around.
Even so, Blanks said, he understands how hard it is to see the city’s transportation schedule change. He’s a daily bus rider, he said, and he estimates he would have to add between $80 and $100 to his monthly budget to pay for taxis to and from work on Sundays.
Regardless of how the board votes on Wednesday, Blanks said, changes will likely not take effect until April in order to give riders time to adjust their routines as needed.
The service change would affect all transit modes, including fixed-route buses, on-demand GLTC Flex rides and paratransit services for riders with disabilities, according to a January press release. The change would be temporary until more drivers can be hired and trained, Poindexter said.
GLTC isn’t alone in facing the challenges of bus driver shortages. Nationwide, the number of transit and intercity bus drivers decreased about 8.5% from 2020 to 2024, from about 163,000 drivers to 149,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment data. School systems have encountered a similar shortage, tracking a 9.5% decrease in bus drivers from 2019 to 2025, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The high average age and rate of retirement among bus drivers, the process of obtaining necessary training and licensing, and the level of stress compared to similar-paying jobs are commonly cited as reasons for the national shortage of drivers. In Lynchburg, Moore said, he has the specific challenge of finding drivers who are qualified to navigate the roads of an old city that can be narrow and congested.