Morgan Mbuyi remembers his first time riding the bus in Concord.

It was winter. He didn’t have a firm grasp on the schedule, and he waited at the stop for what felt like hours.

These days, when a Concord Area Transit bus pulls up to a stop, he’s behind the wheel. From the early morning hours to early afternoon, Mbuyi drives the Concord-Laconia Connector back and forth twice between Penacook and the Lakes Region.

Driving is what Mbuyi loves to do: He’s not cooped up inside all day and it’s largely independent – even contemplative – work.

During several of his years as a refugee in Namibia, he worked as a driver in the country’s tourism industry. Now, in Concord, when his early bird shift with CAT ends, he’s a driving instructor at Second Start.

Mbuyi loves Concord’s smaller size: it’s quiet, safe and feels more homey than many of the bigger cities where other refugees are resettled.

The smaller, more limited public transit that goes along with that can be tough for first-time users — something he learned the hard way.

When friends from Houston or Montreal come to visit and need to get around, “they don’t like it,” he said.

When Terri Paige became the transportation director for the county Community Action Program in 2019, she knew she wanted to make some upgrades. She replaced the entire fleet of buses over the course of a few years and adopted new strategies to keep the buses and stops cleaner. She also oversaw a branding update, as the buses got new wraps and advertisements on the outside.

She also worked with the state to launch the Concord-Laconia Connector, running from the city up through Boscawen and Franklin to the Lakes Region, in February. A critical inter-city link, the Connector is part of a broader effort to centralize regional transit under CAT.

Yet Paige aims to do more to make the bus a more modern system that’s easier to access and use.

Technologically, the bus system hasn’t advanced drastically past how it worked when it made its debut 35 years ago. For example, the 115,000 rides recorded last year were largely measured through hand tallies by drivers and dispatchers.

The vast majority of bus stops are marked only by small white street signs with no bench or enclosure. They don’t include a digital or posted paper schedule. The fixed schedule and a route map are posted in pdf form online, but there are no live updates. If the bus is running late, those waiting at the stop don’t know how long they’ll be there.

“That’s the biggest volume of calls that we get is folks asking, ‘Is the bus coming? Where’s the bus? Did I miss it?’ ” Paige said. “It’s pretty anxiety-producing.”

Paige and her team would like to change that.

The improvements they’re eyeing include live bus tracking technology: Riders wouldn’t have to wonder whether their bus is running on time but could instead check an app in their phone to see when it will arrive.

Paige would also like to add screens inside the bus, useful for riders wondering which is the next stop. Down the line, she’d also like to do a comprehensive evaluation of the routes and stops: Should they be stopping anywhere they aren’t? Are any stops unused? One such study was completed before the pandemic, she noted, but COVID hit before they could use it to make any decisions.

The backbone of funding for local transit in New Hampshire is federal grants and local systems have to come up with matching dollars to receive them.

CAT’s budget last year was $1.34 million. Federal funding was $870,000 of that, with the remaining $470,000 coming from local sources, including towns and cities and private donations. More than a third of the local money was the $171,000 the system received from the city of Concord each of the last several years.

Typically, the state of New Hampshire has also set aside some support, though about 20 times less per capita than even rural peers like Vermont and Maine, according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

After the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dropped additional federal funding in the pipeline, the state drastically increased how much it put forward to help meet it: instead of around $200,000 per year — to be shared by all the systems statewide — the legislature approved around $1.7 million.

“That allowed the agencies to breathe a huge sigh of relief,” said Fred Butler, the public transportation administrator for the state Department of Transportation. “Last year showed about an 18% statewide increase in ridership, so they were all able to essentially keep pace with that increased demand.”

The extra help, though, was short-lived.

The state is staring down major revenue shortfalls in the next budget. In the current proposal from NHDOT, there is no matching help for local transit, Butler said.

Administrative and capital purchases — like a new bus — have a roughly 10–20% matching requirement to get federal money. But operating funds, covering driver and dispatcher salaries, gas, all the day-to-day costs, carry a 50% match. In other words, for every dollar a system receives, it has to raise a dollar of its own. This makes help from the city and state key.

Boosts in federal infrastructure funding are still making their way down to local agencies. A state cut would mean CAT and its peers face a steep uphill battle to raise matching funds at a time when they need it most.

“We have more Federal Transit Administration funds coming into public transportation now than we’ve probably ever had,” Paige said. “But all of those funds require those matches.”

Last year, CAT got $120,000 from the state. “That’s a big hole to fill,” Paige said.

Paige is hopeful for a bipartisan agreement from lawmakers to put money back in the budget for local transit.

“For sure, we’re already making a concerned effort to do some kind of more private donation requests, talking to some of the businesses that we provide a lot of service to,” she said. “But we’re trying to be optimistic, as opposed to anything else.”

While she wants to continue pursuing upgrades and even expansions of CAT, all of that is downstream of retaining funding and staff. Losing operating funds would make CAT’s greatest challenge — retaining and attracting drivers — even harder.

Commercial drivers are in high demand, and public sector jobs often find themselves at the bottom of the labor-pool food chain. Both the state and the city have offered cash bonuses to try and stem the bleeding of winter plow drivers to the private sector.

That’s not in CAT’s budget. But unlike those positions, driving for CAT means regular, daytime, weekday hours. That’s a draw for people, Paige said, but it only gets you so far.

Mbuyi is an example of that: The early bird shift gets out by early afternoon, meaning he can take on his other job with Second Start.

When he first moved to Concord almost 15 years ago, Mbuyi’s oldest daughter was just 3 years old. She’s now in high school. His family has grown, too, with a son in middle school and a 1-year-old baby.

Beyond the benefits of a regular schedule, though, Mbuyi and other drivers pointed to the social aspect of their work. They like meeting their riders and learning their stories.

Mbuyi thought often of a woman from Laconia who recently used the Connector to get to the DMV in Concord so she could get her license back. She succeeded, he recalled.

As he pulled into the stop behind St. Joseph Church, a woman stood at the door and asked where his bus was headed. He grabbed a few pamphlets showing the different routes and walked outside to talk with her.

The connector won’t get her to the store she’s trying to reach, but he showed her how to contact the Mid-State Transit door-to-door service. As the bus pulled away, she waved from her seat on the lawn in front of the public library.

When the bus is empty, Mbuyi turns on the music. He’s come to really like American country stations. Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car,” with its signature riff, came over the speakers, and he gently nodded along.

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can follow her on X @cat_mclaugh and subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.