SURF Express hopes to bus people all across the peninsula

MARINA, Calif. (KION-TV)- SURF is a rapid transit project looking to make life easier for those who travel from city to city on the Central Coast.

CEO and General Manager of MST Carl Sedoryk explains, “Communities from the Salinas Valley, into Marina, to Seaside, and to where the jobs are in Monterey.”

The SURF project will look to connect all cities across the peninsula. So, for example, you can start in Monterey and end your trip to Marina or, if you’d like, even further.

To make the trip faster for riders, special lanes will be placed to prevent traffic jams. This benefits residents like Michael Hawkins, who travels from city to city.

“I work in Sand City, and I can see the freeway in the mornings,” Hawkins said. “It’s backed up sometimes bumper to bumper, and if we had other forms of transit, it wouldn’t be quite so bad.”

A concern for those who might oppose this project is the lack of riders that have used MST Transits the past couple of years. Sedoryk is optimistic this will not stay that way.

“People will start coming back to riding transit, and we’ll be back to our numbers,” Sedoryk said. “We’re already more than a third of the way back from where we were, and we anticipate within the next two years to be 100% back to where we were pre-COVID as far as our ridership.”