CityBus CEO on emergency cut to free Connector route to Purdue: ‘I know that people are unhappy’
CityBus CEO says the blame isn’t on a contract cut by Purdue, but deeper issues about to play out in Greater Lafayette’s public transportation system.
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CITYBUS CEO ON EMERGENCY CUT TO FREE CONNECTOR ROUTE TO PURDUE: ‘I KNOW THAT PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY’
Suspending CityBus’ Connector route – a free line that runs from downtown Lafayette to Purdue and along the western edges of campus – through the rest of 2025 was “an absolute gut punch to have to pull service off the road,” CityBus CEO Bryan Smith said this week.
Still, Smith said the move, in place as of Monday, is more than what he’s seen portrayed in social media, where lingering anger from grad student groups and others laid direct blame on Purdue for breaking ties with CityBus this academic year after a partnership that covered a couple of decades.
Smith said the fallout from the recently strained relationships with the university might have had some indirect claim to the operator shortage CityBus has on its hands. And not having enough drivers to cover shifts on all CityBus routes in Lafayette and West Lafayette was the key to this week’s decision about the Connector/Route 41, he said.
What Smith says gets him about the situation is what it says about hard decisions coming about service for a tax-supported public transportation system working to make up a $3 million budget shortfall in 2026. That budget drop-off is expected to grow deeper over the next several years, according to CityBus projections.
“Trust me, not only do I know that people are unhappy that it happened, but I’m not happy to have done it,” Smith said Monday. “I am committed to provide the service that we say we’re going to provide, and what we came up against was that we weren’t able to do that. It absolutely kills me that we’re in this position, because this is a town that relies on public transportation that we have.”
In the short term, CityBus is covering the Connector service with routes that cover similar streets, albeit now with fares attached.
Purdue reacted by adjusting some services near campus through its new transit partner, SP+, a Chicago-based firm that beat out CityBus and a half-dozen other bidders to win a three-year, $7.8 million contract that started at the start of the fall 2025 semester.
In a letter sent to students Sunday, Jessica Robertson, Purdue’s associate vice president for auxiliary services, pointed them to other CityBus routes with paid fares along the western edge of campus, gave links to discounted, $49 semester passes for students and offered apologies “for the inconvenience presented by this CityBus decision and look forward to continuing to bring you even better bus services as we assess and refine our transit options.”
And students with Graduate Rights and Our Wellbeing – a campus group that has been highly critical of Purdue’s handling of negotiations with CityBus and the loss of free rides off-campus in the past two years – called it another moment that showed gaps in how the university handled transit and parking on a growing campus.
“GROW feels that Purdue’s current response to the discontinuation of the 41 is heavily lacking,” Kieran Hilmer, a Graduate Right and Our Wellbeing member, said. “The main purpose of the 41 for many riders is to connect between Lafayette and West Lafayette, and while expanding bus routes further into West Lafayette may help people living in the dorms, it does nothing to help the 60% of students who live off campus, many of whom made their transit decisions with the freely available 41 in mind. … The fact that Purdue felt the need to send out an emergency, off-hours email addressing the discontinuation of the 41 shows that Purdue needs CityBus to supplement their private bus system.”
That sort of tension stretches back to April 2024, when CityBus announced that it would no longer provide free off-campus rides, which had evolved out of a campus loop contract dating to 1999. At the time, CityBus offered semester passes for $99 or rides at other daily rates. Smith had said the move was a budget necessity that they’d been signaling to the campus for the past year with a contract CityBus said didn’t cover the costs of free rides away from campus. Purdue and CityBus renegotiated a $2.39 million contract for the 2024-25 academic year, including a university subsidy covering part of the cost for semester passes for off-campus routes, with Purdue trustees promising to look into alternatives.
Smith said Purdue was upfront with CityBus about wanting flexibility in how routes were run and how fleets were used, including stopping and starting routes depending on the university’s needs. He said the federal grants that funded part of CityBus’ service don’t allow the agency to hand over that sort of control to Purdue.
Smith said he believed CityBus had a fair shot at the contract but lost to SP+, which promised more on-demand options. Smith said the last contract worked out to a $118 an hour payment for $150 an hour operations. He said CityBus bid $142 an hour for the current Purdue contract.
“We put our best foot forward, and we didn’t get it,” Smith said. “That’s a choice that Purdue made, and I respect the choice.”
Smith said CityBus is looking at how it can win that contract when three years is up for SP+.
But without those 14,000 hours of operating campus service, primarily Monday through Friday, Smith said spreading bus operators across other routes put more in line for weekend shifts and tightened the line of seniority for who qualified for schedules with a guaranteed two days off in a row.
“We had a number of operators that had been with us for very long time, who said, You know what, I’m close enough to retirement to call this done, because I haven’t worked Saturdays in years and I don’t want to start,” Smith said. “We had a number of retirements because of that at the beginning of the semester.”
Smith said CityBus, like other public transit agencies, also has lost drivers to trucking firms, delivery services and other spots, where recruiting for someone with a commercial driver’s license is hot. Along with letting a couple of drivers go for conduct reasons, everyone at CityBus with a CDL was covering routes.
“That includes me,” Smith said.
He said that wasn’t sustainable, leading to the reason for the emergency cut of the Connector route, which had been a free back-and-forth between downtown Lafayette and Purdue since the early-2000s days of CityBus’ trolley.
Smith said CityBus has stepped up its own recruiting and keeping drivers, though not in time to keep the Connector running for the next three months.
Meanwhile, the financial cliff Smith predicted when he announced in 2024 that CityBus could no longer pick up the cost of off-campus rides arrives in the coming year. He said state funding from the Public Mass Transit Fund, while not cut – “which we’re thankful for,” he said – has remained flat since 2022, amid inflation on operation costs. Tax caps on real estate have peeled roughly $2 million from CityBus budgets since 2017. Smith told Lafayette City Council members Monday night that additional partnerships and other local revenue streams haven’t happened.
Smith said the 2026 budget is built without a guarantee of finding sponsors for routes or additional funding
He said that will require a 25% cut in service by May.
Smith said the CityBus board hasn’t made decisions about how that might play out, whether by eliminating other routes, putting a single bus on a route to offer rides every hour rather than half-hour or any other options in play. He said cutting Saturday service, for example, would achieve that goal.
“All of that would take place with a public conversation first,” Smith said.
Until then, he said CityBus is working to re-up contracts with five off-campus apartment complexes to extend dedicated express routes for students who live there. He also said the subsidized semester passes for Purdue expire at the end of the fall semester and will need to be renegotiated for the spring semester. He said he hopes CityBus and Purdue can get that done by Thanksgiving so students know how to plan and can start buying passes before they leave for the semester break.
“We’re going to be negotiating what that looks like for the spring to try to make sure that we’ve got a fair charge, whether it’s the students who are paying it or if Purdue’s going to subsidize part of it,” Smith said.
A general public pass is $155 a semester.
He said CityBus would be back at the Statehouse lobbying for funding answers “that the state can get behind.”
“We’re starting now with that conversation,” Smith said. “There’s a lot happening here, and not just with the Connector. … We’re not pointing fingers. This is just where we are.”
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As a university town with many carless students, we need a robust public transit system. I’d like to see Sen Deery fight for us at the statehouse, if he is indeed representing us to the statehouse and not the other way around.
Purdue University representatives were always very hard bargainers with CityBus. It appears that in recent years Purdue University was very demanding of CityBus services while not being fair or understanding with the community's public transportation system. It may becoming more obvious to Purdue students, particularly graduate students that Purdue University transportation officials have little understanding or care for their real needs. The Connector was a great community service, and Purdue students definitely needed it. But CityBus can't really afford to operate it without enough drivers. Purdue could have done more. It has not. Now we see who suffers.