City of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus Names New Chief Operations Officer

Big Blue Bus (BBB) announced the appointment of Rolando Cruz to the position of chief operations officer.

Cruz brings more than two decades of experience in public transportation to Big Blue Bus. He most recently served as the executive director and vice president of maintenance and facilities at Long Beach Transit in Long Beach, California, and also held the positions of maintenance manager and finance manager during his tenure there. Cruz is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of Texas and holds an MBA and BBA in Accounting from the University of Texas. He is a graduate of the 2008 American Public Transportation Association (APTA) leadership program, a former board member and chair of the Southern California Regional Transit Training Consortium, and a graduate of the Leadership Long Beach Program, where he currently serves as a board member. Cruz also currently serves as co-chair of the California Transit Association Maintenance Committee and is a member of the APTA Transit Asset Management Standards working group.

“We are excited to welcome Rolando Cruz to our organization. He is entering the agency at a time when we face many new challenges, but it is also a time of defining moments in our organization’s history where we will establish new standards that raise the bar for service delivery to the Westside of Los Angeles and the City of Santa Monica,” said King.

BBB hired a record number of staff during 2016, bringing on board 54 new staff including Motor Coach Operators, Maintenance Technicians, Operations and Maintenance Supervisors, and managers to support the Evolution of Blue campaign to provide first-last mile connectivity for customers to and from the seven new Expo Line stations in BBB’s service area. Execution of the campaign resulted in the addition of six new routes, 56,000 new revenue service hours, 10 more buses in peak service, and 225 new bus stops in BBB’s system. Initial counts after the opening of the Expo extension show 15% of all BBB passengers now making rail connections, more than double the number of passengers connecting to BBB from rail prior to the Expo extension.