Lessons in free transit, rural style
What happens when you make transit free in a town known for long commutes?
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(Photo of downtown Durango, Colorado by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash)
In a previous interview, two transit experts told me that when it comes to reducing transportation emissions, “transit can’t do it by itself”: simply making public transportation free could not alone cut a city’s carbon emissions from transportation. Joshua Schank argued that it needed to be paired with other policies that reduced demand for car trips, and specifically mentioned New York’s upcoming congestion fee, which charges cars daily to enter the densest part of Manhattan to fund public transit improvement.
But I was still wondered how transit systems without the scope and history of New York City might take on fareless transit. Fortunately, Colorado has provided a natural experiment: for the past two summers, the state has offered the “Ozone Season Free Transit Grant Program” to encourage local transit districts to make fares free in an effort to improve air quality.
Here’s what happened in Denver, courtesy of Colorado Public Radio reporter Nathaniel Minor:
Free rides on Regional Transportation District (RTD) buses and trains in July and August pushed up the agency’s passenger counts and contributed to an estimated reduction of about 9 million vehicle miles traveled, according to an analysis commissioned by the district. … But the reductions in driving and pollution are also relatively tiny when compared to the overall scale of the problem for Colorado’s transportation sector, which is the state’s largest single source of planet-warming emissions.
Free rides reduced driving in the Denver region by 145,393 miles per day, the report estimates. That’s just 0.17 percent of the estimated 83 million miles traveled daily. And the 6.1 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions saved pale compared to the 12.7 million metric tons the state is trying — and struggling — to eliminate by 2030.
But Denver was not the only grant recipient. In the far southwest corner of the state, the small city of Durango used the grant program to promote its own free transit program.
I previously drove through Durango while reporting a story five years ago, and it’s a part of Colorado that remains fairly rural, on the edge of where mountains turn into high desert, and just north of two Native American reservations and Mesa Verde National Park. Even though has a population of only 18,000, it’s both a regional hub and a tourist destination.
“We have a lot of people who commute in for work from really small rural communities in the mountains,” says Durango transportation Director Sarah Hill.
Hill, who literally got her start at Durango Transit driving buses, has managed the program since the pandemic. The town’s transit system has two main parts: a downtown trolley that travels the length of the business district and five fixed routes through more residential parts of the city. More than 70% of riders surveyed on those fixed routes said in a survey they didn’t have another way to make the trip. “They're using it to get to work and run their shopping and errands and go to the doctor and go to school,” Hill said. Meanwhile, the trolley is popular with tourists. All told, Durango hit 330,000 rides in 2022.
The buses in Durango aren’t particularly expensive: a flat fare of $1. But when they covered the fareboxes and turned off their transit app this summer, they still saw a notable jump in ridership.
While she expects regularly paying $1 might have been a barrier for some, Hill attributes part of the jump to a combination of better marketing and removing uncertainty.
“What we gathered was that people who aren't familiar with transit, just having one unsure transaction — if they have to have cash, where it goes, do they hand it to the driver or do they need exact change — I think that's just enough for people who aren't regular riders to be resistant to trying.” Hill said. Removing that made it easier.
Durango actually used the Colorado grant this year to market the program instead of covering costs. The success of the free fare period the summer before had convinced Durango City Council to use money from the city’s lodging tax to cover loss of revenue for three months. This year’s effort, Hill says, was about expanding their communications.
For example: the weekly farmer’s market is right across the road from the transit center, she said, so they had the market push the program to their clients as a way to get from home directly to the market. “That wasn't really a crowd that we had targeted in the past with advertising,” she said.
Both summers saw ridership increase, Hill says, but the second year was higher than first, jumping from 90,000 rides during the three free months in 2022, to 120,000 rides in 2023. Some routes had periods of being so completely full they had to send back up buses. Durango saw a drop off when the $1 fare came back in September, but Hill says the numbers each month are still higher year over year. Rides increased 9% in October compared to the same month in 2022, even though, as Hill notes, gas prices were much higher last year.
(My quick-and-dirty Google Sheets graph of Durango's ridership data. June, July and August of both years were free fare periods)
Will they provide free transit next summer or just go fully fareless? The city is planning to use the lodgers tax again to fund free transit next summer, and expanding that is a “conversation we’re interested in having,” Hill says. But whether funding comes from Colorado or the city, money is a concern - she estimates a $300,000 cost, and while that’s “not insurmountable” with a $2.5 million operating budget, the system has been running at a deficit.
Ultimately, Durango Transit’s operating budget, not recurring state grants, would help them shift the kind of system they could offer, fareless or not, Hill says.
“All of our service operates every 30 minutes, that's just infrequent enough for people to have to really plan if they're going to use transit,” Hill says. “So if we could identify some funding and expand so that we are hitting our transit stops every 10 or 15 minutes, versus every 20 or 30 minutes, I think that would be really appealing to a lot of people who live and work in Durango.”
Housing affordability is top of mind, Hill says, and it’s reaching “crisis levels” in Colorado mountain towns. She thinks transit has a huge role to play in that, both in building more dense development downtown where the trolley is, and being able to connect people from outside the city limits to jobs downtown.
“In order to do that, we need to expand be able to expand our service area from residential centers to the downtown economic hub, and then also increased the frequency so that it's not prohibitive and it makes sense for people to hop on a bus and know that they can rely on it to get them to work on time, and to get them home,” she said.
What about other policies that could help pair with free transit, like Schank mentioned? The 2021 infrastructure law “crosses her mind immediately,” but she notes a lot of it was offered to go towards capital costs, and towards electrification.
Buying electric buses is really important, Hill says, but may not make immediate sense for rural agencies struggling to provide useful, regular service.
“You have these small rural agencies who are trying to spend that money to electrify their fleet, but they don't have enough money to get their patients to their daily dialysis appointments with a lack of operating funds,” she said. “Both things are really important, and I think the money should just be flexible enough to respond to that.”
More Local Climate Stories
(NB: I have not looked through or linked any stories from the Washington Post as staff there are on strike today )
- Young activists who won Montana climate case want to stop power plant on Yellowstone River (AP)
- Massachusetts outlines new strategy for getting customers and utilities off of natural gas(WBUR)
- America’s First Major Offshore Wind Farm Is Now Online (Heatmap)
- Seattle’s outgoing city council looks to curb building emissions (KNKX)
- Oil-friendly ad blitz targets California climate policies (E&E News)
- Alaskan and Canadian representatives of the Gwich’in Nation have come to DC to push for stopping long-term oil and gas drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (KTUU)
- Borrowing ambient energy from deep underground could bring a stretch of Carbondale buildings closer to net-zero (Aspen Times)
- Michigan regulators approve key permit for Enbridge Line 5 pipeline(Bridge Michigan)
- The Native Americans building their own solar farms (BBC Future)