Albuquerque’s Transit Failure
How Albuquerque fails to deliver transit despite having the funding and a plan
In nearly five years since the end of the lockdown in 2021, Albuquerque has failed to restore transit service to pre-pandemic levels. This, despite having the funding to do so. The department is leaving money on the table because it is unable to use it; it is unable to provide the level of transit service it so easily did before the pandemic. Instead it is stuck in a rut, unable to retain the staff it hires and operating at about 60% of 2019 levels. The gap between what is funded and what is actually delivered has quietly become one of the most consequential failures in how the city functions.
In this post, we look at how this happened and what it will take to fix it.
Reduced Service
We start by looking at how much service has actually been reduced and its cumulative impact over the last 5 years.
If we plot the monthly vehicle-hours of service provided by ABQ RIDE (fixed route buses including ART), we see a clear story. Service was extremely constant from at least 2012 until the COVID-19 pandemic. We were not adding more transit, but we were not removing any either.
During this period the city provided about 33,500 vehicle-hours of service each month (indicated by the red line in the graph). The variations about this average are due in part to unequal number of weekdays, weekend days, and holidays in each month, as well to, I’m sure, some small amount of missed service.
We can look at service provided relative to the pre-pandemic level, by subtracting the 33,500 hours/month average. This also will allow us to visualize the cumulative impact of reduced service over the years. To further make sense of this we color the period when the state was under a lockdown mandate in blue, and the period after the end of the lockdown mandate in red (up to present).
This plot also immediately tells a strong story. The lockdown resulted in an immediate reduction of provided service. Variations during this period are due to both adjusting the planned service hours and actual missed service hours. Just as sharply as the start of the lockdown brought service down, it rebounded immediately, if briefly, the first month after the lockdown was lifted. The COVID-19 pandemic in general, and the effects of the lockdown were a once-in a lifetime level emergency and whatever happened during this period (in blue) is not as interesting or consequential for long-term normal operations.
What is interesting is what has happened after; the period since the lockdown was lifted (in red). We can see an almost immediate start of a steady 2-year decline in provided service, finally reaching a low of about 13,200 fewer hours than the pre-pandemic level in September 2023. Following this decline, we have mostly hovered at ~60% service relative to the pre-pandemic level for the past two and a half years. We seem to be stuck.
The nearly five years since the end of the lockdown have had a significant cumulative effect, visualized by the shaded red area. Since the end of the pandemic-era lockdown, ABQ RIDE has provided a cumulative 471,600 fewer hours of service, or about 14 full months of pre-pandemic service. The effect of this on ridership and the perception of transit cannot be understated.
Since the end of the pandemic-era lockdown, ABQ RIDE has provided a cumulative 471,600 fewer hours of service, or about 14 full months of pre-pandemic service.
Why did this happen? Why did ABQ RIDE provide less and less service each month for over 2 years? Why has it been stuck at only 60% service for another nearly 3 years? It might be compelling to believe this was driven by demand. In fact there was a huge drop in ridership following the pandemic. But the amount of service does not respond directly to demand, but to budgets and schedules. What happened was something more fundamental: the department couldn’t hire or maintain bus drivers and mechanics. It lost staff faster than it could hire. And it was left with enough money and enough positions to provide the desired service but without a way to spend it. And that is where we still are nearly 5 years after the end of the lockdown mandate.
Staffing Shortages
ABQ RIDE has had persistent shortages in both bus drivers (motorcoach operators) and mechanics (particularly level II and III mechanics) since the end of the pandemic lockdown. This is by far the number one issue affecting the transit department. I have served on the Transit Advisory Board since May 2024, and this is a standing item at every meeting, with the transit director reporting monthly changes in staffing levels. The ABQ RIDE Forward Recovery Network Plan, designed by Jarrett Walker + Associates, identified this as a major issue stating:
“In the past five years, a severe shortage of transit workers has made it hard for the City to staff all of its routes. This means that only 63% of the service that the City offered in 2019 is currently provided on the transit network in 2024. The result has been major cuts to frequency on high-ridership routes (such as Route 11 Lomas offering 40-minute frequency instead of 20-minute frequency), shorter hours and days of service on many routes, and the elimination of the lowest-ridership peak-only routes.”
Similarly, the more recent Rio Metro/ABQ RIDE Consolidation Study, states:
“ABQ RIDE is currently operating 60% of pre-pandemic service, while Rio Metro is operating fully restored service. Rio Metro cut some service at the onset of the pandemic but fully restored service by 2023. ABQ RIDE cut service in 2020 and again in 2021 and has not been able to increase service beyond 60% of pre-pandemic service due to staffing shortages. ABQ RIDE needs 249 bus operators to operate full service but 112 of those positions are vacant. It also needs 134 maintenance positions but 51 of those are vacant. ABQ RIDE has been hiring 100 new operators and mechanics per year, but the new hires have been offset by continued staff attrition.”
The 112 vacant bus driver positions were for early 2025, but we can look at how this has changed, or not, over time. The city’s data dashboard only shows total filled positions data from September 2022 to December 2025; these are plotted below with filled positions in blue and vacant ones in red. The total number of funded driver positions is 256.
There have been ups and downs throughout the years, but net effect is a persistent shortage hovering around 100 vacancies +/- 20. The first few months of 2026 are not shown in the plot but have seen some positive gains, with the latest numbers I’ve heard being 84 vacancies currently. This, however, still falls within what has been “normal” for the last several years, and is not reason to celebrate yet.
This persistent shortage is not an inability to hire, but an inability to retain staff. Here again, we’ll focus on bus drivers, but mechanic vacancies see similar dynamics. The city’s data dashboard only provides driver hires and loss data from January 2022 through February 2025. In this period, the department hired an average of 4 new drivers per month but also lost an average 5 drivers per month.
The plot shows monthly new hires (blue), losses (red), and net change in vacancies (hires - losses) in yellow. The net effect is a slow decrease in total number of filled positions, with net loss of 18 positions in 2022, 7 positions in 2023, and 8 positions in 2024.
The problem is clearly the inability to retain staff, but why does the department struggle so much to do so? The answer is simple: compensation does not reflect the demands of the job. The Consolidation Study puts it this way:
“Many ABQ RIDE employees have difficult schedules, required overtime, low pay, and safety concerns. These issues span many different divisions including operators, mechanics, call center, and paratransit providers. These factors make it hard for ABQ RIDE to be competitive in the hiring market in Albuquerque and once hired, it is also difficult to keep employees.”
The department is losing drivers and mechanics both to the private market (e.g., Amazon) and to other departments where they can get the same pay while having a less demanding job. For example, a driver could get a more predictable schedule and no customer service requirements when driving for Solid Waste. Similarly it is common to lose mechanics to the Fire department, where they would work on simpler vehicles and have more consistent schedules. Again, from the consolidation study:
“ABQ RIDE essentially has full in-house ability to do everything except build a new bus. This includes engine rebuilding, painting, and fixing both electric and combustion engines” … “This requires a broad range of skills, and the diversity and challenge of the work is part of what keeps some mechanics in the department.” … “Despite the difference in skillsets, ABQ RIDE mechanics are part of the same pay structure as other mechanics in the City with no extra compensation for the type of labor nor work schedule that they perform.” … “ABQ RIDE employees lack job classifications and compensation that meet the needs specifically required for transit agency employees, particularly with those who work in operations and maintenance”
The solution is clear: compensation that reflects the demands of the job. The Consolidation Study ultimately recommends making ABQ RIDE an independent agency, largely so it can negotiate its own labor agreements. But regardless of structure, the core issue is the same: transit staff are not paid in a way that matches the difficulty and conditions of the work. The Transit Advisory Board recently passed a resolution urging the city to adopt differentiated pay for transit drivers and mechanics.
A Way Forward: It Is All Political
The pandemic disrupted our economy and labor markets abruptly. Governments and businesses alike had to adjust to rapidly changing conditions. ABQ RIDE did not adapt. For nearly five years, it has been unable to retain the staff needed to operate the system, and as a result, it has failed at its most basic function: delivering a baseline level of transit service. This was something it consistently and reliably did prior to 2019.
At this point, the explanation is no longer unclear. The problem has been identified repeatedly, and so has the solution. ABQ RIDE cannot retain workers because compensation does not match the demands of the job. Fixing that requires paying transit operators and mechanics in a way that reflects the demands of the job. Most failing institutions would be lucky to have a problem this simple and a solution this obvious.
To be clear, this is not easy. Adjusting pay structures and negotiating labor agreements takes time and effort. But surely it is not an insurmountable problem. The fact that it hasn’t been solved in five years speaks for itself.
At this point, this is a political choice.
The city already has a plan to restore service. The ABQ RIDE Forward Recovery Network is designed to bring the system back to roughly 95% of pre-pandemic service, while improving access to jobs and increasing ridership. It is a strong and relatively cost-neutral redesign.
In other cities, including Houston, similar network redesigns have been implemented overnight. Entire countries have switched from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight. Albuquerque has a 16-step rollout over four years that will bring us to 95% of 2019 levels by 2029. Nearly a decade lost. Instead of fixing the staffing constraint, the city is pacing the rollout and simply hoping staffing improves over time. It is hard to overstate how backwards this is.
The city has the funding. It has a plan. What it lacks is political will. It was refreshing to see the consolidation study call out this lack of political will directly, repeatedly making clear that increased political will and funding streams are essential.
Political will doesn’t appear on its own. One way it is created is by pressure from constituents. The one thing that gives me hope is the growing advocacy around transit. That advocacy has to turn into sustained pressure for change.
I’ll be at the May 7th COW (Committee of the Whole) meeting where the transit budget will be discussed. Hope you can join me.
Read Part 1 here, where we compare Albuquerque’s transit service to cities across the region.
So glad you are here to help force our politicians to look at transit as some more than an "entitlement". Something that modern cities support and do well at.
Thank you for writing this ❤️