Bobby Slaughter measures his day in smiles when he gets behind the wheel of the van he drives for Lynchburg’s transit company.
“Sometimes people get on, and they’re having a bad day, and you’re able to just leave them with a smile,” he said. “You meet all different kinds of people with all different kinds of situations, and you don’t know what they’re going through, but you’re able to offer them a smile.”
Slaughter, 69, has been working for the Greater Lynchburg Transit Company part time for about two years, after retiring from a full-time position he held there for seven years. As a self-proclaimed “people person,” he said, he wants to keep getting out of the house — and getting Lynchburg residents where they need to go — in his retirement. Every day is different as he gets riders to work, to class, to the grocery store, and every stop in between with GLTC’s point-to-point van service.
Slaughter’s van trips are also measured in budget lines.
The fuel it takes to power Slaughter’s trips and fixed bus routes in the Lynchburg transit system cost about 50% more in March than in February, said Josh Moore, GLTC’s general manager. The costs to replace buses and the vans that Slaughter drives are about 25% higher than normal due to tariffs, he added. The insurance that protects Slaughter’s trips has been rising year over year.
And the state grant that funds “Flex” at GLTC — the van service Slaughter helps to operate — expires in June. With Flex, riders can request on-demand van transportation from point A to point B within Lynchburg’s southeastern neighborhoods such as Wyndhurst, Cornerstone and the Timberlake Road corridor.
All together, Flex service is one example of a pattern seen throughout GLTC and transit companies across the state and country, Moore said. Costs are rising and funding isn’t keeping up. An ongoing shortage of drivers adds to the uncertainty, Moore said, as he and his colleagues hone in on plans for a new fiscal year.
The transit system currently operates 14 bus routes, on-demand Flex van rides, and paratransit services for riders with disabilities throughout Lynchburg and a portion of Madison Heights, transporting an average of 56,000 riders per month so far this year.
Those services will no longer run on Sundays, starting this weekend, to alleviate some pressures of understaffing. As budget discussions take shape this month, Moore said, more service reductions could be on the horizon.
“There is a lot of uncertainty right now, but we’re trying to plan as much as possible, because we don’t want to be in a position where we get up to the wall and realize we’re out of time to determine a path,” Moore said.
Sunday service pauses due to understaffing
On April 1, the transit company’s board of directors voted to temporarily suspend Sunday service, starting in May. Every 90 days, the board plans to reassess the company’s staffing levels to determine if Sunday service can be reimplemented.
Sunday service was targeted for the cut, Moore said, because Sundays historically have the lowest ridership of the week.
The company is short four bus operators, and freezing Sunday service frees up three full-time positions, Moore said at the April board meeting. That means that, even with the pause to Sunday service, the company will still start each day looking for operators to pick up extra shifts to close the gap — but the gap will be smaller.
“We were really burning out our operators,” Moore said of the overtime drivers were working in the months leading up to the board’s vote. “We just had so many holes. And it was getting to the point where we had to cancel routes last minute because we just couldn’t fill them.”
Slaughter said that, as a part-time worker, he’s avoided most of the stress of staffing shortages, but he said he remembers his full-time days well, and “that’s a whole different monster.”
“A lot of the time, you can work a good eight to 12, maybe sometimes 14 hours. They give you a little break in between, but then you still got to pull the rest of that shift,” he said. “If somebody don’t show up, guess what? You got to keep driving.”
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, 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, combined with the often complicated process of obtaining necessary training and licensing to become a driver, are commonly cited as reasons for the shortage.
Moore said he feels those trends at GLTC. The company’s main hiring challenge, he added, is competing with similar-paying retail and fast food jobs that “have none of the restrictions” that driving jobs do. GLTC drivers have to pass drug tests and meet strict health requirements to get behind the wheel. About a third of GLTC applicants fail the drug test before they have the chance to become operators, Moore said, and others with health conditions can be discouraged by long health-monitoring periods and extensive testing.
To tackle the hiring challenge, Moore said, GLTC leaders are always looking for ways to make the on-ramps to becoming an operator more accessible.
That can take the form of hiring fairs, when applicants can ask questions and complete pre-interviews to streamline the application process. The next hiring fair is scheduled for May 6 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the transfer station on Kemper Street.
It also takes the form of summer camps, Moore said. The company has partnered with local youth organizations in recent years to introduce school-age children to the day-to-day tasks of operators and diesel mechanics and teach how those career paths can take shape.
The most successful on-ramp, Moore said, is paid in-house training. GLTC will pay applicants between 80% and 85% of the starting operator wage, depending on prior driving experience, to complete a multi-week training program to obtain a commercial driver’s license and learn the ins and outs of Lynchburg’s routes.
Five drivers are in the program now, Moore said — that’s just enough to offset upcoming retirements and current long-term medical leaves.
Rising costs and uncertain funding shape budget season
Stopping Sunday service will save the transit company a little money in overtime pay and fuel, Moore said, but not nearly enough to close an expected gap between rising costs and diminishing funding for the 2027 fiscal year.
The transit company’s total annual budget is about $10 million, when local, state and federal dollars are combined.
The transit system is facing increasing costs with the rising price of insurance, vehicles and their parts, and fuel, Moore explained at an April joint work session with the Lynchburg City Council and the GLTC board. The company’s health insurance costs alone have increased by about $800,000 in the past two years, Moore said in an interview this week. And monthly fuel costs rose from about $28,000 in February to $43,000 in March due to the ongoing conflict in Iran.
Meanwhile, the company is expecting a decrease in state funding for the 2027 fiscal year. The state’s share of a ridership incentive program will shrink, a separate state grant for the Flex van services will expire, and other state funding is in flux, according to presentation materials from GLTC’s March board retreat. As that state funding diminishes, the transit company has a smaller pot to use as a match for federal funding, which shrinks its budget further.
The city has proposed keeping its contribution to GLTC flat from this fiscal year to the next, at $1.9 million.
When City Manager Wynter Benda presented the city’s proposed budget in March, he called it a “maintenance budget” designed to carry on the city’s current level of operations and investments without raising taxes or introducing new initiatives. City departments and agencies like GLTC were asked to absorb inflationary cost increases into their individual budgets and not exceed their 2026 city budget allocations.
Without additional state grants or city funding, the transit company will have to cut back its services, Moore said. The current plan to make ends meet is to eliminate Route 1B, which covers the Langhorne Road corridor and Lynchburg General Hospital, and reduce schedules or combine routes in other areas, including downtown, the River Ridge Mall area, Memorial Avenue and parts of Timberlake Road. Sunday service would be eliminated entirely, with no restoration possible if staffing increases, and the Flex van rides would be substantially reduced, too.
It’s the first time the transit company has considered service changes at such a scale since 2011, Moore said, when “funds were extremely tight” in the wake of the Great Recession. Since then, a partnership with Liberty University and pandemic-era funding had given GLTC the funding boosts it needed, Moore said. Both are over now, leaving the transit system in a “new normal,” he said.
Two key funding components remain on the table for 2027, Moore said.
One is a state grant that would provide $1.5 million over five years for the system to operate its Flex van service. The grant steps down every year, requiring the city to put forward about $2.4 million as a local match over the five-year span. Without a clear commitment from the city council and city staff for that level of funding over time, the GLTC board plans not to accept the grant, board members said at an April meeting.
Moore said it’s a matter of being “good stewards” of state money so Lynchburg can continue to be seen as a smart place to invest. If GLTC accepts the grant, it makes a commitment to running Flex services for the five-year period; backing out of that commitment due to an unfilled local match could break valuable trust with state officials, he said.
The other funding component is $800,000 in one-time funding that the city has proposed allocating to GLTC “to help bridge the immediate funding gap and preserve federal match funding,” according to a letter that city staff sent to city council members and transit board members in April.
If approved by the city council, the $800,000 would be applied to the transit system’s 2027 budget, but would disappear in 2028, leaving GLTC with the same flat city contribution as today.
“We don’t want to say no to money to stabilize our system. But I don’t see things getting better for FY28 … and this feels like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” said Cameron Howe, the president of GLTC’s board.
The transit system would likely not make any service cuts if both the state grant for Flex and the $800,000 in city funds were secured, Moore said. But there are still “total unknowns,” including how fuel prices will ebb and flow and how federal funding will change after a key transit bill expires in September, he said.
Riders feel the effects
Ben Blanks, who’s served on the GLTC board since 2019, rides the bus almost every day. He takes public transit mainly to protect his pocketbook, he said.
A monthlong pass for unlimited GLTC rides on fixed route buses and Flex vans costs $50. A day pass is $4.
AAA estimates that the average cost of owning a car is more than $12,000 a year when insurance, gas and maintenance are factored in. Blanks can get a year’s-worth of public transit service for $600 — and put the rest of his paychecks toward rent, bills, groceries and other necessities, he said.
He estimates that, now that Sunday service is canceled, he’ll have to add between $80 and $100 to his monthly budget to pay for taxis to take him to and from work on Sundays.
“I’m worried about the riders getting where they need to go, especially the ones like me that work and need to have a reliable way to get back and forth to work,” he said. “I feel for those riders, because budgets are tight, and you can’t always afford a taxi or find a friend that can get you there.”
About seven of every 10 GLTC customers use public transit to get to work, according to a presentation Moore gave at the April work session with the city council.
“I think that sometimes folks think of public transit as a social service, but it really is a workforce tool, because we’ve got to be able to give everyone access to employment,” said Alec Brebner, executive director of the Central Virginia Planning District Commission. About a third of U.S. residents don’t drive, due to a range of reasons from having a disability to not being able to afford a car, Brebner said.
“The employers often saying ‘I can’t find anyone to work’ — fast food restaurants or hotels or retail — are in professions where jobs are less likely to have an income that sustains car ownership, and therefore transit may be really a necessary option for them to get to work,” he said. “So it’s not just the people that ride the bus that benefit, but it’s we, as a regional metropolitan economy, that gain value by GLTC being able to serve our workforce.”
What’s next for GLTC?
The transit company’s budget and service deliberations come on the backdrop of sustained ridership growth. The number of annual riders rose from about 502,000 in 2023 to 568,000 in 2024 and 683,000 in 2025, rebounding from a pre-pandemic 2019 baseline of about 774,000.
Some of the growth is due to the natural return of residents to in-person work and community life after the pandemic, Moore said. Other growth he attributes to the strides that GLTC has made to modernize the transit system’s services.
“We really experienced the boost in ridership when we deployed our newest technologies,” he said, including an app with live updates and a mobile fare collection system.
As the city continues to grow with new housing developments, job creation, and more, Howe said, GLTC wants to be in a position where it can keep up with demand, alleviate increasing traffic congestion, and make Lynchburg affordable for new residents.
“We want to make sure that we have a bus system that can meet those needs of our community. I mean, transit isn’t just an idea for us,” Howe said at the April work session. with the city council. “It is how our neighbors get to doctor’s appointments, it’s how people get to work, it’s how they get involved into the community, and it’s how some of our board members got to this meeting today.”
The transit system is always looking for ways to operate more efficiently and evolve with the city’s needs, Moore said, and it is participating in four transportation studies in 2026 and 2027 to plan ahead in various target areas.
The city has also proposed spending $500,000 in one-time funding to conduct a study to “guide long-term transit investment and ensure decisions are data-driven and financially sustainable,” according to the April letter from city staff. The transit system could seek state grants for a study of that kind if it’s deemed necessary, but “these are things the GLTC would want to partner and collaborate with the City on, and not push it through FY27 at the full expense of the City / GLTC,” transit board members wrote in a responding letter to city staff.
The city’s $800,000 in one-time stabilization dollars and $500,000 in one-time study dollars would be pulled from a special reserve fund, established under the transit company’s memorandum of understanding with the city, that’s been added to over the years whenever the transit company has surplus and is “used to cover unplanned cash shortfalls,” according to the MOU.
The special reserve fund now sits at about $1.4 million, according to the city’s Chief Financial Officer Donna Witt.
If the one-time funding proposals are approved for the 2027 fiscal year, the reserve fund would be drained to $100,000, Howe said. Part of the board’s task for planning ahead, she added, is weighing if it’s better to save those reserves for emergencies in the future.
On April 16, GLTC board members sent another letter to city staff and the city council, asking for the city’s position on committing to the grant that could fund Flex, the city’s plan for allocating funding to GLTC in the upcoming fiscal year, and a list of documents that board members requested to better understand their financial standing with the city — including records of about $940,000 in loans the transit system owes the city. Witt said that two loans totaling the $940,000 sum were originally taken in the 2024 fiscal year and need to be “paid as soon as possible”; Howe said this year’s budget discussions were “the first I heard” about the status of the loans and is seeking clarification.
As of Thursday, the GLTC board has not received a response to the letter, Howe said. The GLTC board will continue to discuss its budget at its next meeting, scheduled for May 6 at 8:30 a.m. at the Kemper Street transfer station. Budget discussions will continue by the city council, too, with a first budget reading scheduled for May 12 and a second reading and adoption scheduled for May 26.
