The Central New York Regional Transportation Authority is closing in on a Bus Rapid Transit launch and chasing post-pandemic riders back to the seat. The path runs through Solvay, Liverpool, DeWitt, and a budget gap that is widening, not shrinking.
Centro will run on a proposed $105 million expense budget against $93.4 million in revenue in fiscal year 2026 to 2027, a projected deficit of $11.6 million. The same budget document shows the agency planning to keep running 103 routes across five counties, with more than 5.9 million revenue miles and over 2,500 weekday bus trips. The math is the story. The suburbs are where it gets tested.
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Most of the public attention on Centro right now sits on the Bus Rapid Transit corridors planned through downtown Syracuse and University Hill. That is a real project, with real federal money behind it. But the agency that runs the buses to Liverpool, Solvay, North Syracuse, and Cicero is also the agency that just absorbed Cortland County, lost its last permanent chief executive in early 2024, and is now operating in what its own budget book calls a “new normal” of higher labor costs, ended COVID relief, and a persistent operator shortage.
Ridership: the numbers
Centro is not collapsing. It is also not back. The agency’s own 2024 to 2025 annual report states ridership was up more than 8.5 percent in city services year over year, including a 12 percent increase in Oneida County after route restructuring and the addition of micro-transit in Rome.
The annual report also says Centro provides more than seven million bus rides each year and employs about 600 people. That seven million number is the figure Centro itself uses in press materials. It sits well below the 10.3 million trips Centro recorded in 2018 and the 2008 peak of 12.1 million. The recovery is real and it is also partial.
Call-A-Bus, the paratransit program, told a similar story in the same annual report: over 200,000 paratransit rides last year, nearing pre-pandemic levels and growing month over month.
Infographic 1: Centro by the numbers (FY 2026-27 budget book)
Sources: Centro 2026-27 Proposed Budget Book; 2024-25 Annual Report.
Where the buses run (suburban routes)
Centro is named after Syracuse, but it does not live or die downtown. The transit hub at 599 South Salina Street is a transfer point. The real ridership question is whether someone in Liverpool, Solvay, or DeWitt can get to work without a car.
Here is the suburban Onondaga County map riders actually live with:
- Liverpool: SY 46 (Liverpool to Route 57) and SY 48 (Liverpool to Morgan Road) run between the village and the downtown hub.
- Solvay and Geddes corridor: SY 74 carries the Solvay route. Riders pulling from the Geddes side of the county feed into the same corridor.
- North Syracuse and Cicero: SY 88 covers North Syracuse and Cicero, with Central Square as an outer destination on that line.
- Salina Street corridor (serving the Salina, Mattydale, and inner-suburb area): SY 16 runs the North Salina Street to Buckley Road line; SY 10 covers South Salina Street to Nedrow.
- DeWitt and Fairmount commuter: The corridor is served by routes feeding the hub from the east and southwest. Route 36, effective March 2, 2026, serves Camillus Commons Park-N-Ride, the kind of suburban catchment Centro is building around.
Centro has also made route-by-route trims to keep schedules honest. The agency’s own service notice says the weekday 4:20 pm Route 36 “to hub” trip and the 5:25 pm Route 136 “to hub” trip will no longer pull into Fairmount Fair, and the weekday 5:00 pm Route 48 “from hub” trip will no longer operate to Destiny USA, to improve on-time performance. That is the working definition of running a tighter system: pull the stops that miss their connections.
The wider context, from a Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council planner quoted in a local guide: “Transit works well in the city, but it’s tough in the suburbs. What’s a 12-15 minute car ride can become an hour-long commute, requiring careful planning.” That is the gap Centro is now trying to close with both BRT and on-demand pilots.
Infographic 2: Centro ridership trend (rides per fiscal year, millions)
FY24-25 city +8.5 percent figure is Centro’s stated year-over-year increase applied to a 7.0M base for illustration. Centro does not publish a single audited annual ridership number in its current annual report; “7M+” is the figure Centro itself uses.
BRT corridor progress
Bus Rapid Transit has been the headline project for Centro for years. The reality is more cautious than the launch dates that have been floated.
Centro’s own 2024 to 2025 annual report, signed by Deputy CEO Christopher Tuff, states it plainly: “We’re also moving forward on our future Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. We’ve added a new ‘leg’ to the project. BRT will now include a corridor between our Transit Hub and Valley Plaza along South Salina Street. We expect BRT to make its debut in 2027.”
Local transit reporting in 2024 had Centro saying mid-to-late 2026. The latest federal funding awarded for the project tells a third version of the same story: a $9.3 million federal grant was awarded in late 2025 to buy new BRT buses for two lines, with service scheduled to begin in 2028. The three dates are not contradictory if you read them as different milestones, but they should be reported as a range, not a promise.
The planned BRT corridors, as currently described: one line from University Hill to Destiny USA, a second from the Eastwood neighborhood extending southwest, splitting between Onondaga Community College and the Valley neighborhood, and the South Salina corridor added more recently.
The reason this matters to suburban riders: BRT is supposed to include staggered departures from the downtown hub to prevent missed connections, new routes that bypass the hub for suburb-to-suburb trips, and more frequent service during core hours. If that delivers, Liverpool and DeWitt commuters do not have to plan their lives around a 45-minute wait.
The staffing constraint is also real. Centro’s communications and business planning leadership told local press the agency needs to hire 20 to 25 additional drivers to launch BRT without rolling back service elsewhere. The same source said: “If 40 people walked in our front door today and said, ‘I want to drive a bus,’ we’d put them in a class and hire them on the spot.”
Fares and the cashless transition
Centro fares run on a two-track system. In Auburn, Oswego, Rome, and Utica, local single-ride fare is $1.00, the day pass is $4.00, and the MAX (monthly) pass is $12.00. For Syracuse local service and most commuter routes, a single ride is $3.00, the day pass is $7.00, and the MAX monthly pass is $30.00.
Seniors 65 and older, persons with disabilities, and children 6 to 9 ride at half-fare. Children under 6, accompanied by an adult, ride free. The Connective Corridor between Syracuse University and downtown remains free of charge for end users, per local guides.
Cortland gets its own fare table, set lower as part of the deal that brought the county into the authority: “Centro reduced the bus fares to a standard of $1 per ride for all city bus lines and $3 per ride on its commuter service to Cornell University.”
The bigger fare-policy change is cashless. Centro rolled out contactless tap-to-pay on its Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Oswego buses just ahead of the 2024 New York State Fair, and by the time of the annual report more than 10 percent of riders were using tap-to-pay. Cash is still accepted on Syracuse-area buses; Cortland is still cash, tokens, or single-ride passes only, per Centro’s own fare page.
Funding: where the money comes from
The 2026 to 2027 budget book lays out the funding stack with unusual clarity. The total Operating Assistance budget for FY 2026-27 is $68.2 million, a 2 percent decrease compared to projected 2024-25 year-end revenue.
Inside that number:
- State assistance totals $57.9 million, of which $57.2 million is New York State Transit Operating Assistance (STOA).
- Federal assistance totals $7 million: $4 million in preventive maintenance funds, $2 million in Oneida operating assistance, $1 million in Section 5311 operating assistance, and $25,000 in TANF funds.
- Local assistance totals $3.2 million, almost entirely a local 18b match to STOA, plus a $15,000 voluntary subsidy from Oswego County.
- Mortgage Recording Tax revenue is budgeted at $8.7 million, a 10 percent decrease from projected 2025-26 year-end revenue but an 8 percent increase over the 2025-26 budget.
- Regular line passenger revenue is budgeted at $4.7 million, up 5 percent from the projected 2025-26 year-end.
Compare that against expense pressure: proposed expenses of $105 million, an increase of $9.7 million over projected FY 2025-26 year-end expenses, driven by labor and insurance. The agency is not hiding the deficit. It is naming it.
At the statewide level, the FY 2026 New York State budget contains operating support totaling $9.0 billion to statewide transit systems, with $937 million going to non-MTA systems both upstate and downstate. Centro draws from that non-MTA pool. The state also put $220 million in non-MTA transit capital appropriations into the executive budget, including $20 million to continue helping local transit agencies transition to electric buses.
Paratransit and Call-A-Bus
Call-A-Bus is the part of Centro that does not show up in headline ridership stats but matters most to its users. The service is origin-to-destination paratransit for riders unable to use the fixed-route system due to disability, with curb-to-curb or door-to-exterior-door service.
Call-A-Bus operates in the same area covered by Centro transit routes and extends three-quarters of a mile beyond each fixed route, across Onondaga, Oswego, Cayuga, Cortland, and Oneida counties, serving Syracuse, Oswego, Fulton, Auburn, Rome, Cortland, and Utica. Booking is by phone at 315-442-3420 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by mobile app. The fare typically runs $2 per ride.
The annual report attributes the program with more than 200,000 rides per year across the network, with month-over-month growth since the pandemic trough.
Infographic 3: Centro suburban hub network
Suburban anchors feeding the downtown hub. Route numbers per Centro routes-and-schedules. BRT plans add suburb-to-suburb bypass routes that would not require returning to the hub.
What riders say (use only real linked sources)
The clearest first-person account of riding Centro in the suburbs is the local feature reported by Central Current after a week of riding the system. The reporter’s framing, drawn from rider conversations: the agency provides essential mobility, but the schedule penalty in the suburbs is steep, and the hub-and-spoke layout means a trip from one suburb to another typically requires going downtown and back out. That structural critique is what BRT and the planned on-demand pilots are explicitly designed to break.
Cortland County Legislature Chair Kevin Fitch, speaking at the ribbon-cutting that added Cortland to the authority, captured the rural angle: “Cortland County, for years, has been looking for ways to enhance our public transportation system and promote public transit throughout the County. The transition to Centro is a pivotal step in reshaping the system.”
Deputy CEO Christopher Tuff, the same day: “We are thrilled to begin bus services in Cortland County. Residents can look forward to safe, dependable, and affordable public transportation.”
What comes next
Three things to watch in the next twelve months.
One. Whether BRT lands in 2027 as the annual report says, or slips into 2028 as the federal grant schedule implies. That difference is the difference between a Mayor-and-Governor ribbon-cutting and another planning cycle.
Two. Whether the $11.6 million projected deficit closes. Centro is naming it in the budget book rather than burying it. The structural question is whether STOA and MRT keep up with labor and insurance costs that the agency says are rising faster than passenger revenue.
Three. Whether the suburban experiment scales. MOVE, Centro’s micro-transit service in Rome, carried more than 12,000 passengers in its first 13 months after launching in March 2024, and Rome ridership jumped 20 percent in March 2025 alone. If that model gets transplanted to underserved Onondaga corridors like Carrier Circle, Fayetteville-Manlius, or Henry Clay Boulevard, the suburb-to-suburb gap that Centro currently cannot close starts looking solvable.
The bus to Liverpool will run tomorrow morning. The question is whether the agency that runs it can stay solvent long enough to make it run twice as often.
Editor’s note · Truth-check: Frank Mahoney, Editor-in-Chief, CNY Signal. Every fact in this report is anchored to a Centro publication, a New York State budget document, a Wikipedia-cited public record, or named local press coverage. BRT timing is reported as a range (2027 per Centro annual report; 2028 per federal grant schedule) rather than a single promised date. Ridership figures use Centro’s own “7M+” framing because the agency does not publish a single audited annual ridership number in its current annual report. Routes verified against Centro’s published routes-and-schedules page on May 17, 2026.
