The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Wait, wait, wait.
Two years ago there was no free bus service running up and down the valley between Gunnison and Mt. Crested Butte carrying tens of thousands of people and now that there is one…it sucks? Really?
I don’t remember a huge uproar about something we didn’t have before 2007. I do remember Al Smith tried to start a bus route between Crested Butte and Crested Butte South and one reason people wouldn’t ride it was because he was charging a dollar.
So now that we have something that everyone has to admit is a real asset to the valley, it is apparently bound to end up being a baby killer?
Wow.
Slow down, people. It’s nothing that money won’t solve. But that’s what it will take, not necessarily names on a petition.
In an ideal world, the RTA buses would go by every house in the county, pick up young children and drop them off at their activities while the driver waits for little Timmy’s soccer lesson to finish. Hey, I wish my kids and I could ride the bus from my house outside of town. I pay into the RTA through sales tax like everyone else.
But to read the letters and hear the comments over the service to Cement Creek Road as opposed to going to the Crested Butte South General Store, you’d think the RTA was begging for little kids to run the highway slalom between speeding cars. “It’ll make the little buggers tougher,” I can hear the board members saying.
Some facts in this debate: A few years ago there was an exploratory committee set up to see how much a bus running between the Four-way in town and Crested Butte South would cost. For the Cadillac of service, operating buses every day for 17 hours a day, every hour or so, the cost was estimated to be about $360,000 a year. That didn’t include the cost of the bus. Ummm, okay. It ain’t inexpensive. Oh yeah… and that study was done when gas was cheap.
According to the RTA, adjusting the current schedule that runs by Cement Creek Road to get the bus into Crested Butte South would add approximately $83,000 to the cost of the service for the year. The RTA drivers aren’t piloting 50-passenger Priuses up and down the valley. Adjusting the schedule for a six-month test is not “free.”
The Crested Butte South Property Owners Association surveyed their membership earlier this year and the results showed that 63 percent of the people living there have used the RTA bus… the RTA bus that doesn’t go into the subdivision. Kudos.
According to POA manager Chris Behan, the people who responded to the survey rated bus service to Crested Butte South as the number one priority of ten options. I would, too. The vast majority of the 1,550 people living in Crested Butte South take a right when they hit the highway to head to work, so a bus would be a benefit.
The same survey asked if property owners would agree to a one-time $200 increase to their annual dues. It would raise about $180,000 and wasn’t specifically tied to bus service. Forty percent of the respondents said they would agree to a dues increase. Just over half of the people responding to the survey said they’d support a real estate transfer tax in the future, but no real numbers were suggested. Twenty-four percent of the respondents said they would not support any increase in fees.
In the winter, when the buses from Gunnison are usually packed full of workers and skiers coming up from Gunnison, would it still make sense to pull into Crested Butte South when no one could get on? The bus is already leaving people behind in Gunnison because it is too full.
I have no doubt a free bus running into Crested Butte South would get used. It makes sense to figure out a way for that to happen. There’s that money thing again. As a resident of the Skyland area, do I want to pay for that? Not really. I doubt the people living at Meridian Lake or Buckhorn Ranch want to foot that bill either.
The RTA also funds the “guarantees” to the airlines along with the bus service. That doesn’t mean just because you pay RTA sales tax you can hop on a United or Delta flight for free out of Gunnison anytime you want. In fact it costs a hell of a lot even though many of those planes have more empty seats than the buses. But most of us see the greater good of providing airplanes to the area that we may not use often. Sort of like having those RTA buses running up and down the highway bringing people to work from the farthest base point and getting cars off the road.
Is the RTA system perfect? God knows it’s not. There is some real danger currently at the Cement Creek intersection. People are trying to address that situation. Let’s hope they do it before something tragic happens, and based on what bus drivers have said, there is a sincere chance of a bad accident if things don’t change.
Overall, the RTA is not without faults, but it works pretty well. I’ll let my kids catch it in town and ride it to Gunnison on occasion. It’s an option that wasn’t there just a few years ago. Do I want them flagging it down on the highway? Frankly, I’d rather dip my kids in honey and tie them to a tree in Bear Alley than risk having them catch the bus on 135. That’s why I don’t let them. I don’t let them do a lot of things until I think they are old enough.
One more thing. A lot of the ire expressed at the RTA is directed at its executive director, Scott Truex. Just so everyone knows as a matter of full disclosure, Truex is a good friend of mine. But with any public board, it is the board members—not the director—who make policy decisions. The system is set up so anyone with an idea can go to a meeting, plead your case to the board and the board members can make a decision. And they have.
But like so many things in life, it simply comes down to a matter of money…and everyone is trying to do the best they can, for the most people involved, with the money they have.
