City of Sedona staff say supply chain issues are holding back the city’s upcoming microtransit project yet again.
Last December, when the purchase of five microtransit buses was approved by the Sedona City Council, Transit Administrator Robert Weber expected the project to be up and running by this fall.
“We’re back in the market again,” Weber said. “The reason for the initial delay was we actually ordered five microtransit vehicles last December. Then after the council approved it, we were notified that the manufacturer stopped manufacturing buses.”
Now, Weber was notified in the last week that the buses’ chassis that the city would have purchased were bought out before the council could vote on the increased purchase price at their meeting on Aug. 9.
The original agenda item, that has since been pulled, asked the city to approve the purchase of three buses for $501,684.
In December, three of these buses were approved to be purchased by the city for $336,567, while the other two buses would be covered by the city’s federal transportation grant.
“We’re likely going to have to go in line for the 2023 chassis, and there will be an additional price increase, although we don’t know what that is yet,” Weber said. “In general, what’s been happening, like in every other industry, they’re seeing about a 40% increase in bus manufacturing between 2021 and 2022. And then we don’t know what 2023 is going to look like.”
The microtransit program will service a large portion of the city to provide shared-ride transportation.
The service covers roughly three-quarters of a mile on either side of State Route 89A from West Sedona all the way into Uptown and down through the Chapel area to the existing Sedona Shuttle park and ride.
Users will book the curb-to-curb service through the TransLoc app, the TransLoc website or the city’s microtransit reservation hotline.
The service’s algorithm maximizes the vehicle’s productivity by mapping each pickup and dropoff location to lay out the best wait times and directions to get to the users’ destinations.
“The idea here is to get single occupancy vehicles off the road and encourage people to use alternative transportation by way of a shared-ride service, just to try to reduce the number of single occupancy vehicles on the road,” Weber said “And microtransit is not just new to Sedona. It’s being deployed throughout the U.S. in cities, either rural or urban, that have similar traffic problems in high-density areas, which is what we have up into Uptown and West Sedona.”
Although Weber and the city hope the service will be up by next Spring, the cost change and supply chain issues make the timeline hard to predict.
