RTA summer ridership up, board looks to 2015

Experimental CB South bus service finished for season

The Gunnison Valley’s Rural Transportation Authority’s summer bus experiment is over and the results are in. Bus service into Crested Butte South resulted in an increase of about 25 more one-way trips per day than likely would have occurred if the buses had stopped only at the intersection of Cement Creek Rd. and Highway 135. That averages out to about one more person getting on the bus and one more person getting off each time the bus stopped in Crested Butte South.

“Last spring I made a suggestion to the board of directors that the RTA try expanding the service by running six trips a day (each direction) between Gunnison and Mt. Crested Butte and running all 12 of those bus trips into Crested Butte South as an experiment to see what kind of ridership numbers we could generate,” said RTA executive director Scott Truex. “Now that the trial is over, it will be up to the board of directors to determine the success of the experiment.”
The RTA traditionally runs a year-round free bus service with three round-trips between Crested Butte and Gunnison each day. The route has long included a flag-stop at Cement Creek Rd.
The decision for the buses to turn off the highway and stop in Crested Butte South at Red Mountain Park was part of an effort to increase safety, to better serve the subdivision and to potentially increase ridership. The RTA chose to make the change during the six busiest weeks of summer, June 28 to August 10, in an effort to give the service the best chance possible of success.
“The board felt that this experiment would be able to provide a fairly robust schedule during the busiest time of the year while the kids were out of school,” said Truex. “We only budgeted to run the experiment for the six weeks and it cost about $36,000 (about $30,000 for the extra three trips per day and $6,000 for the deviations into the subdivision). The concept was to try this experiment for this period of time and then use the results to make more informed decisions for next summer.”
According to the RTA’s ridership numbers for the six weeks studied, the overall bus usage was “very strong between Gunnison and Crested Butte/Mt. Crested Butte,” with 21 incidences of overcrowding in July that required the RTA to run backup buses.
“The deviation into the subdivision did not detour people from using the RTA service between the two ends of the valley,” said Truex. “The overcrowding has continued past the end of the experiment and the RTA has had to run backup buses fairly regularly since we returned to the three-trip schedule in order to be sure everyone got where they needed to go.”
A report on the summer service will be presented at the RTA’s next meeting, which will be September 19 in Gunnison. It is expected that during the fall budget meetings the RTA board will use this information to discuss and make decisions regarding next year’s service.