sdtransit-jan26-cuts

Atypical San Diego MTS service changes - January 2026

Alex Wenzel (atwenzel//at//protonmail//dot//com) March 28, 2026

Summary: Historically, the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) has used “schedule adjustments” and similar language to describe small changes in trip scheduling without substantial changes in service levels. This practice appears to have changed with the January 2026 service change. MTS used “schedule adjustments” language instead to describe decreases in service during all or part of the day on 14 routes resulting in a loss of at least 113 trips relative to Fall of 2025.

Revision notes can be found here

Definitions

headway: The amount of time between trips on a route. For example, “15 minute headways” means a vehicle arrives every 15 minutes.
span: The amount of time in a day during which a route is operational.

Background

The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System is the public transit provider for most of central, southern, and eastern San Diego County. Like many transit agencies in the country, MTS faces budget deficits within the next few years, as the availability of federal stimulus spending during the Covid-19 pandemic obscured the need to update normal, recurring funding sources in response to inflation. After reallocating capital funding by delaying new construction and bus fleet electrification, MTS estimates it would need to save $30 million via service cuts absent a local ballot measure or other new source of funding before 2028.

With the exception of certain major changes such as the opening of the Blue Line Trolley extension in November of 2021 or the emergency service cuts due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, MTS typically updates its bus and light rail service three times per year. These service changes serve multiple purposes. Service changes add or remove beach or school day service depending on the time of year and introduce changes in response to ridership trends or minor adjustments to scheduling based on recent performance. For example, MTS may adjust some trips on one route to start a few minutes earlier to improve a frequently-used connection with another route. Because operator scheduling is determined by seniority-based bidding system that all operators participate in at each change, routine service changes allow bus and Trolley operators to choose more preferred work based on their accrued experience.

January 2026 service change descriptions fail to list service decreases

In the weeks prior to a service change, MTS publishes a notice on its website and in print on vehicles describing the proposed changes. In the January 2026 service change, for example, MTS notes the “[d]iscontinuation of two northbound AM trips” on route 41 (UCSD - Fashion Valley via Genesee), the two earliest extra school day trips, likely due to low ridereship and more demand for those resources elsewhere in the system. However, some decreases in service are not specifically described. The service change description for route 985 (UCSD Trolley - Torrey Pines circulator) is:

Schedule adjustments in AM & PM peaks, with extended mid-day service.

On its face, this appears to be a service increase. Route 985 previously operated only during rush hour periods. However, this description does not communicate that the “[s]chedule adjustments in AM & PM peaks” are actually significant service reductions, reducing its 15 minute headways to 30 minutes (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Changes in route 985 service between September 2025 and February 2026. The horizontal axis represents time of day, and each vertical line represents the start of a trip.

Mid-day service was indeed added, but this change reduces flexibilty for commutes as route 985 trips now connect with every other Blue Line train instead of every train and there is a net loss of 4 trips throughout the day. These changes are not clear in the service change description.

NOTE: While researching this, I discovered that MTS wrote a blog post about this service change. This post contains the following paragraph:

Adjusting to travel patterns: Another million dollar savings was found through removing some morning trips throughout the system. In general, MTS has been seeing recent travel pattern changes, with fewer people using bus service in the morning, and more frequent use in the afternoon. Using this intel, the team identified several routes and morning trippers that could be consolidated into less frequent service, while still maintaining ridership capacities.

This post, as far as I know, was not promoted publicly and was not included in any of the “Rider Insider” emails, which usually include posts like this. The vast majority of riders are unlikely to encounter this information since it was described only as “schedule adjustments” in the service change. This post was published on a Friday before the Sunday service change, leaving little time for riders to notice or adjust to this information. This post also omits some all-day headway changes, which are included below.

Route 985 is not the only route with changes like these. Below, several other routes’ service levels before and after the change are shown, along with the description accompanying the change for that route. This is not a complete list of all routes with unclear or undisclosed changes. For complete data, see this spreadsheet.