You’ve undoubtedly seen the deep blue “Ride the S” public transit buses around Stanislaus County. Nightly they are parked at a downtown Modesto location but that’s about to change when the Stanislaus Regional Transit Authority (StanRTA) builds a new $100 million operations facility in southwest Ceres.
StanRTA has purchased 28 acres at the northwest corner of Crows Landing and Service roads for a new operations yard and administration offices. The land acquisition cost approximately $9 million.
“We’ve outgrown our facility in downtown Modesto where we’re at right now, and we’re required to move towards zero emission buses, and we don’t have the space to add all that infrastructure as well,” said StanRTA CEO Adam Barth.
The current StanRTA yard is located on Eighth Street in downtown Modesto in the shadow of the recently constructed Needham Street bridge. Parked there are the 90 full-size buses and about 50 smaller para-transit buses.
The push toward zero emission vehicles will happen gradually, Barth said, “but over the next decade or so, we need to gradually get there and there’s just not enough space to accommodate all the chargers for 140 buses or a hydrogen fueling station which is the other option for zero emission buses.”
The facility will include a 10-bay maintenance shop as well as a building operations for training and administrative staff.
While about 20 sites were evaluated, the Ceres site was right in terms of size and proximity to the main hub of Modesto.
“It is right there on Crows Landing Road so it’s a direct shot right into downtown Modesto once the Seventh Street Bridge is done, which it’ll be done before we move out to the new site.”
He anticipates the site will accommodate StanRTA’s needs for 50 years or longer as well as expand.
Barth remains hopeful that the city of Turlock gets onboard as a Joint Powers Authority member. Ceres turned over the Ceres Area Transit (CAT) operations to the city of Modesto in 2019 which in turn became a member of StanRTA. The move was because of better economies of scale and not be subject to penalties for falling short in ridership revenues.
“Everybody in the county but Turlock is part of our JPA. They elected to run their own system, not join the JPA. And I think it probably just would be some time, so just keep going and they’ll come on board at some point.”
Barth explained that the Ceres property was purchased with Local Transportation Funds issued by the state of California.
“We are applying for some federal funds to help with the project costs. We haven’t got those yet.”
StanRTA still must win city approval for the master plan while environmental studies and design work is completed. It’s unknown when that comes before the Ceres Planning Commission.
“We should have that project team on board soon to do that design work and then we’ll be able to move forward with hopefully construction in a year and a half or so,” said Barth. “We do need a little bit more funding to make the project happen. We do have a good chunk of the funding but not everything we need to make the project happen.”
Barth said StanRTA provides approximately 10,000 to 11,000 rides daily on the large buses. The smaller vehicles mostly provide door-to-door service catering to the disabled and elderly.
