A Reddit user complained that the 27 bus line<\/a>, which he picks up at the Emeryville Amtrak, has been canceled multiple times in the last few weeks. Another Redditor said they\u02bbve experienced multiple canceled trips on the 57 and NL lines<\/a>, with the 57, which is supposed to run every 10 minutes, becoming \u201cbasically a twice-an-hour line now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like several lines have been reduced without officially being reduced,\u201d they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The complaints aren\u2019t limited to the biggest East Bay cities. The 8 a.m. 211 line from Warm Springs\u2019 BART station was canceled<\/a> on Monday morning, according to a post by one rider, a computer science educator.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ren Fitzgerald, a UC Berkeley college student and mass transit fan, said they were afraid that\u00a0 the system\u2019s unreliability, which has made them late to class, would also affect the public\u2019s willingness to give AC Transit more money through the tax measure<\/a> on the November ballot. They said one day they woke up early to make sure they got to class on time, knowing a bus might be canceled, but consecutive no-shows on Line 6 still made them late.<\/p>\n \u201cThese services are so bad that planning for them and accounting for them in your scheduling no longer works,\u201d Fitzgerald told The Oaklandside.\u00a0<\/p>\n Priyanka Altman, a young Oakland musician, told us that bus delays are forcing her to consider buying a car.<\/p>\n Many other riders were especially frustrated that their experience was the opposite of what the agency promised in 2025: that its Realign process would reduce<\/a> service to 85% of pre-pandemic levels in order to make buses more dependable and on time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jean Walsh, an AC Transit board director who has represented Ward 2, which includes Berkeley and parts of Oakland, since 2020, has been vocal about the reliability issues at meetings and online. Last week, during morning commute hours, the 6, 57, F, 18, and 88 lines each had cancellations, she posted.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThese are all major lines that carry a lot of people,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAC Transit needs to get a handle on this unreliability problem ASAP.\u201d<\/p>\n At a September 10 board meeting, Aaron Vogel, the agency\u2019s chief operating officer, acknowledged the reliability failures and attributed them to \u201coverlapping operational changes,\u201d including \u201cworkforce fluctuation, ongoing realignment, network refinement.\u201d<\/p>\n Vogel said the agency made 829,000 of 862,000 scheduled trips, or about 96%, from January to June, and during the same period, its buses were on time at a rate of 73.6%. The agency defines a bus as on time if it leaves a stop within one minute before and five minutes after the scheduled time. The agency\u2019s current reliability goal, according to its KPI page, is a modest 75%.<\/p>\n Vogel said the on-time rate actually improved slightly over the first few months of the Realign campaign, rising from 72.9%.\u00a0<\/p>\n An epidemic of missing drivers<\/p>\n The largest cause of missed trips was a lack of drivers, Vogel said, mostly due to insufficient staffing and driver callouts, leading to 14,000 trips missed from January to June.\u00a0<\/p>\n In its September report<\/a> and board presentation, AC Transit noted that the number of drivers on staff fell from 1,280 to 1,222 from July 2025 to June 2026, with 40 drivers departing, including 18 retirements.\u00a0<\/p>\n AC Transit has also experienced a high number of unscheduled absences, according to a recent triennial performance audit prepared for the agency by management consulting firm Pierlott & Associates LLC for the MTC. The report found that over the last three years, unscheduled absences haven\u2019t dropped below 22% and reached nearly 24% in the 2025-2026 fiscal year. The bump up in absences last year, the auditors found, was due in part to \u201cgreater use of long-term and protected leave.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The agency told the auditors that it had worked with its bus driver union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192, on \u201cschedule improvements, operator quality-of-life initiatives, and operational refinements\u201d to reduce absences and better cover callouts. AC Transit also said it has adjusted the run time of some bus lines to allow for better compliance on meal breaks and rest periods for drivers.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThe greatest challenge was unscheduled unavailability, which averaged 23.87% against the target of 14%,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cThe district has resumed hiring, prioritized attendance management, and assigned new operators for divisions with the greatest need.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the biggest lines affected by workforce availability is the 1T, or the BRT bus line on International Boulevard, according to AC Transit\u2019s September presentation. The line has suffered cancellations because schedulers have pulled drivers from that route to fill other gaps in the system.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThe bottom line is we need to get workforce,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cWe need to get people in the seat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n At an Oakland City Council\u2013AC Transit interagency meeting in July, Metropolitan Transportation Commission staff explained that the key to successful regional transit was to \u201chelp transit riders get to where they want to go more quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u200aStephanie Hom, assistant director at the MTC, one of the bus system\u2019s main funders, said the commission\u2019s newly adopted transit priority policy for roadways recommended road projects that would improve reliability. One example she highlighted was the introduction of bus bulbs and boarding islands, including in Oakland, which have eliminated the need for buses to pull in and out of traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n AC Transit\u2019s reliability is lower than similar-sized agencies<\/p>\n The triennial performance audit found that AC Transit\u2019s on-time performance has been largely the same over the past six months as it has been in the previous three years.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a good thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n From the 2023-2024 fiscal year to 2025-2026, the number of missed trips did fall from 5.5% of all trips to 4%. On-time performance for the same audit period \u2014 that window from one minute early to five minutes late \u2014 hovered around 74%.<\/p>\n Vogel described that as a \u201csteady performance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But the Oaklandside found that compared with other bus agencies with similar trip counts, AC Transit\u2019s on-time performance is dismal.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n San Diego\u2019s Metropolitan Transit System, for example, operates a similar number of annual trips as AC Transit, about 40 million. According to that agency\u2019s three-year audit<\/a> last year, its buses run on time 85% to 92% of the time, depending on the service, even with a tighter on-time definition of zero to plus-five minutes. TriMet in Portland, Ore., with about 42 million annual trips, had an on-time performance<\/a> of 85% between July 2025 and July 2026, within the same on-time window as AC Transit. Long Beach, with half the annual boardings, comes in at 84% on-time performance in the same on-time window.\u00a0<\/p>\n Diane Shaw, the AC Transit board president, said at the September board meeting that data in a six-month report covering January through June of this year exposed problems that needed to be corrected right away. One was the on-time departure rate. A late departure leaves a driver trying to catch up, and often falling behind, during the rest of the workday. For the most recent six-month period, AC Transit found that one of the on-time departure rate indicators \u2014 defined internally as a departure within 60 seconds of the scheduled time, called First Timepoint On-Time Performance internally \u2014 was 33%.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThat is really horrendous,\u201d Shaw said. \u201cWe need to really try to understand\u201d what\u2019s driving the lateness.<\/p>\n An advocate creates a real-time digital report card<\/p>\n Kuan Butts has lived in Oakland for more than 10 years, starting in North Oakland and recently moving to the Grand Lake district with his wife and young child. During that time, Butts has advocated for improved roads as a volunteer for Traffic Violence Rapid Response, a group of people who\u2019ve sought to reduce lethal collisions through infrastructure redesigns.\u00a0<\/p>\n As OakDOT has slowly been catching up<\/a> on repaving and traffic-slowing projects, Butts has shifted his focus to improving Oakland\u2019s bus service, especially the lines that run along Grand and Oakland avenues, which he frequently takes, using his skills as a developer who builds mapping software.<\/p>\n So far, he\u2019s not impressed with AC Transit\u2019s on-time performance, the agency\u2019s recent scheduling decisions \u2014 or its data transparency.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRealign replaced Line 33 with Line 88, a 20-minute headway with gaps approaching 30 minutes now,\u201d he said at the September AC Transit board meeting. Headway is the frequency of service; he noted that a decade ago Line 33 arrived every 12 minutes. \u201cThis is the most sparse service schedule offered in over a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n Riders, Butts said, \u201cwere asked to accept less frequency in exchange for reliability,\u201d yet his own data analysis shows that service on all lines operated the expected number of trips about 98.5% of the time immediately before Realign\u2019s implementation in 2025. By July 2026, reliability had dropped to 89.9% in both his reliability data \u2014 and AC Transit\u2019s.<\/p>\n Butts said he generates his findings from AC Transit\u2019s public vehicle-position data feed. The buses\u2019 onboard sensors report locations approximately every 15 seconds to the agency\u2019s transit management equipment, which enriches those locations with schedules, operator log-ons, trip assignments, geofences, and other operational information to produce arrival predictions and internal performance records. The agency also exports a less enriched, standardized data feed, which is the one Butts uses, as do third-party services such as Google Maps.<\/p>\n Vogel, the agency\u2019s chief operating officer, said at the September meeting that the agency\u2019s data has had some quality issues this year, including some \u201cthat caused some on-time performance to be recorded as late.\u201d He said some were due to problems with the vendor, including improper geofencing. The September reliability report said that this led to some buses that left on time being incorrectly recorded as late.<\/p>\n Butts said even the underlying data coming from the buses can be inaccurate. Sometimes digital schedules aren\u2019t properly loaded<\/a> into buses, or the buses\u2019 computers won\u2019t work, or bus drivers don\u2019t log into the system properly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen those inputs are misconfigured, the prediction system can produce false positives: confident arrival estimates for buses that are not actually coming,\u201d Butts said. He said it can also produce false negatives: \u201ca bus may be operating but missing from the feed.\u201d<\/p>\n Butts says AC Transit\u2019s Line U, which serves people riding from Fremont BART to Stanford University, is a \u201cpainfully extreme\u201d example. In his archive of service from April 18 through September 9, there were 1,089 scheduled Line U trips, but zero were recognized in the vehicle feed. This doesn\u2019t mean the buses didn\u2019t actually run, but it\u2019s an indication of how incomplete AC Transit\u2019s underlying data can be.<\/p>\n The engineer said he believes the agency would face more public pressure on its reliability issues if it was able to disclose real-time data more routinely and more transparently. Currently, the agency provides reliability reports to the board every six months and has a public Key Performance Indicators<\/a> page that offers monthly high-level data, including the agency\u2019s overall on-time performance. But it lacks line-by-line on-time analysis \u2014 or daily data.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other riders have expressed their frustration with the agency\u2019s data. At the September board meeting, a rider who identified himself as Evan said that seeing stats 30 to 90 days after the fact didn\u2019t help him keep the agency honest and made AC Transit, instead, feel like an \u201cimpenetrable\u201d wall.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTreat your riders like they are smart, intelligent people, telling them information,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n To fill in the data transparency gap, Butts built his own reliability-reporting site pulling from the raw data feed.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/oaklandside.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AC_Transit_screenshots_side_by_side_1280x960.png\"){kind=spacer}
UC Berkeley student Ren Fitzgerald\u2019s recent screenshots of canceled bus rides. Credit: Courtesy of Ren Fitzgerald<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/oaklandside.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot-2026-09-24-at-2.22.47-PM-1600x517.png\")
Oakland resident Kuan Butts created a site that grades AC Transit\u2019s service and on-time performance using its raw data feed. Credit: Courtesy of Kuan Butts<\/p>\n