Central Ohio Transit Authority buses "missed" around 32,000 trips from January to August amid ongoing reliability issues with some of its fleet, COTA Deputy CEO Garth Weithman said.
That means buses never showed up for 6.4% of the more than 497,000 trips COTA ran during the first eight months of this year, Weithman told the COTA Board of Trustees at its Sept. 23 meeting.
"No one in this room is happy with that," Weithman told the board.
At the same time, COTA has seen a 54% increase in customer complaints, Weithman said.
A major source of the missed trips is COTA's 50 electric buses. Despite making up around 17% of the fleet, the buses are only able to handle around 3% of COTA's service hours, COTA President and CEO Monica Téllez-Fowler told The
Dispatch in an exclusive interview.
COTA's electric buses are currently under a recall from manufacturer New Flyer due to a defect in the vehicles' batteries that could cause a short circuit, and potentially a fire, when the buses are fully or near fully charged. COTA can only charge these buses to around 75%, drastically reducing their travel range, The Dispatch previously reported.
COTA recently installed four charging stations on its electric bus routes, allowing the vehicles to recharge in the field instead of having to come back to COTA's maintenance garage, Téllez-Fowler told The Dispatch.
COTA has to rely more heavily on its older compressed natural gas (CNG) buses to fill the gaps left by the electric buses. This, in turn, means the compressed natural gas buses have to go in for maintenance more often, taking another bus off the road.
"It's a nasty cycle, right?" Téllez-Fowler said.
COTA ordered 38 new CNG buses in 2025, 10 of which have already arrived. The rest should be in service by the end of October. The authority also ordered 38 new CNG buses in 2026, which will begin to arrive near the end of 2027, Téllez-Fowler said.
The authority is "absolutely" taking a step back from ordering new electric buses, for now, Téllez-Fowler said.
"Reliability is most important to us. The customer experience is most important to us. And while we had a sustainability goal, we've updated that to align with the reality of [the electric buses]. I don't know that the technology was necessarily where it should have been," she said.
COTA is not planning any service improvements for January – normally one of the three times of the year when the authority announces new bus lines – to give the fleet time to catch up, COTA spokesperson Jeff Pullin told The Dispatch.
Reporter Nathan Hart can be reached at NHart@dispatch.com, @NathanRHart on X and nathanhart.dispatch.com on Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: COTA buses 'missed' some 32,000 trips thru Aug. They're working on it, execs say
