Since September, monthly ridership on the Charlottesville Transit Service (CTS) has been up on average 15 percent over the previous year. We can guess why, right? With gas prices boiling over at $4 a gallon, more and more people are leaving the car at home and hopping on the bus.
Except we’d be wrong. What the ridership data actually indicates is what we Charlottesvillians know in our heart of hearts to be true: It’s all about UVA.
Starting in July 2007, University faculty, students and staff started riding city buses for free, thanks to a $130,000 contribution from UVA. Since then, about 12 percent of CTS riders have just gotten on by flashing University ID. Ridership on Route 7, which runs from Fashion Square Mall to the Downtown Mall via the Corner, has gone up dramatically and caught up with the Free Trolley. Together, those two routes make up two-thirds of CTS riders.
“I think it’s more than just the University, but I do think the primary source of our growth has been University ridership,” says Bill Watterson, CTS manager. “We are a university town, so this is certainly what you would expect.”
Gas prices, of course, can be a blessing and curse for CTS—they get people on the bus, but also increase the costs of moving the bus. “That is the double-edged sword,” Watterson says. “We have an 18 percent increase in our fuel line item for the coming budget year, and hopefully that’s going to be sufficient.” CTS is budgeting about $740,000 for fuel in the next fiscal year, which starts in July.
More transit options may be on the way for localities. CTS is adding buses and routes in August. Amtrak has plans for a new train that would run in the mornings from Lynchburg to Washington, D.C., and vice versa in the evenings, with stops in Charlottesville—a way to get D.C. commuters off the roads and on the rails. And on June 16, City Council heard from its Street Car Task Force, which recommended that the city hire necessary consultants to study the base costs to build and operate the system.
But for public transit, the question always comes back to ridership. And a trip out to the Shell Gas station at Barracks Road yields a lot of bitching about gas prices, but few people who can or would take a ride.
“The distances I drive are so short because the town is so small it wouldn’t really matter,” says Charlie O’Brien.
Tiffany Dimmie, a Buckingham resident, wishes she could ride. “If they had [buses in Buckingham], I’d really take advantage of it,” says Dimmie, who drives a Toyota SUV. “I’m trying to sell my car right now.”
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