This booming town really does need public transportation

Streamline: Bozeman’s New Public Transit System

By Marjorie Smith, 3-20-07

Since last August, Bozeman and Belgrade residents have taken 50,000 rides on the new Streamline bus system, which is Bozeman’s first public transportation system since the death of the old trolleys that plied the streets between downtown and the MSU campus more than seventy years ago.

I’ve taken at least 40 of those Streamline rides myself. For the past six weeks, I’ve been wandering the streets of Bozeman with my new heartthrob. I can’t begin to describe how deliciously disconcerting it is for me with my abiding (my daughter calls it bizarre) fondness for public transportation to view the familiar scenes of my hometown from the windows of a bus.

According to David Kack, who chairs the Galavan-Streamline advisory board, “What we projected would be 300 rides a day in the first year is already over 500 rides a day.”

On the days I take a music class at MSU, I stroll four blocks from my house to the downtown central bus stop by the old Kenyon Noble store and hop aboard either the red or yellow line. Ten to 12 minutes later I get off at the Student Union Building. It’s a darn sight more pleasant to walk from the SUB to the music building across campus than it is to hike approximately twice as far from the remote (cheap) parking lot out beyond the fieldhouse through whatever weather the west wind decides to fling at Eleventh Avenue. When class is over, I have half an hour to stroll back to the SUB, time enough to grab a latte along the way perhaps, and take either the yellow or blue route home. Either bus lets me off two blocks from my house.

I realize that my inner city location gives me optimum access to Streamline, but apparently it works for hundreds of other folks, too, and gives me an entirely new view of this little mountain boom town. The first day I took the bus I was charmed to find several of my fellow passengers conversing in Spanish. Another day two young men got on speaking a Slavic language. One day I took the green route to Belgrade and back. This bus caters to the park-and-ride crowd, and the driver praised the folks at the Valley Bank Belgrade, the Country Kitchen and the former Valley Ice Garden for letting bus riders park for free in their lots.

Oh, did I mention that the bus rides are also free to riders? They’re funded with a combination of federal transportation funds ($548,000 in this first year), with $380,000 coming from other sources including Galavan, the local non-profit that provides transportation for elderly and disabled residents, plus the United Way and the Montana Department of Transportation. The Associated Students of MSU kicked in what would otherwise have gone to their commuter bus system.

As I ride – and watch my fellow passengers – I have to wonder: how much could Streamline charge for this ride and still get passengers? How much would I pay to avoid the rigors of that remote parking lot?

David Kack says, “I don’t see us charging in the near future. We have to apply for the federal grant each year, but at present, federal funding is a percentage of our operations budget after any collected fares are deducted, so collecting fares would cut down on that grant.” He points out that charging fares involves additional challenges. “We’d have to buy fare boxes, set up systems to prevent theft, establish discounts for seniors or students, and then enforce against misuse of discount passes.” He mentions comparable communities that have free bus service:  Park City and Logan in Utah, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “And,” he points out, “except on campus, parking is free so people tend to think driving to the mall or downtown is free. Most people don’t think about the cost of gasoline until they’re filling their tanks.”

Streamline’s success has inevitably resulted in requests for expansion of service. Right now, three of the routes are traversed once an hour from roughly 7 AM to 7 PM, while the Belgrade route has morning buses that leave at 6:10 AM and 7:10 AM, two mid-day circuits from the Student Union to Belgrade and back, and two evening trips to Belgrade departing the SUB at 5:10 and 6:10 PM. The buses run Monday through Friday except on major holidays. Most of the buses travel in one-way circles, so the ride home might be a good deal longer than the ride to work or vice versa. Yet Bozeman is still small enough that most of these detours don’t take long.

“People are constantly asking, couldn’t you start earlier or run a couple hours later, or run on Saturdays? For that to happen, we’d have to have a new source of funding,” says David Kack. “We might move to an urban transportation district to fund Saturday and Sunday service.” A transportation district, with carefully designated borders, would ask its voters to approve a mil levy dedicated to the bus system.

There have been requests for MSU to put something into the pot beyond what the Associated Students contribute. In a recent article in the student newspaper, the Exponent, MSU’s vice president for finance, Craig Roloff, was quoted as insisting that he would have to see evidence that MSU faculty and staff were using the system before Streamline finds a place in MSU’s the budget. I could give him anecdotal evidence about the folks I see riding the bus, but Kack thinks a broader approach is needed.

“They need to consider the university’s impact on traffic, look at the broader community implications. Is MSU going to be part of the community and invest in this? Perhaps the bus system can postpone the need for additional parking on campus.”

Kack’s position as chair of the Streamline advisory board is voluntary, but in his day job he is a research associate at MSU’s Western Transportation Institute, and he can marshal pro-public transportation arguments to suit many audiences. “There are always people who grumble if it comes to approving a mil levy that they never have taken the bus and never will,” he says. “We have to help them see that for every person riding the bus, that’s one less car competing for parking or backing up traffic at the stoplights.”

Kack and all the Streamline drivers I’ve spoken to are anxiously awaiting news on when the system will get new buses. The current buses came from the Laidlaw fleet in Spokane (Laidlaw operates Streamline, Galavan and the Bozeman School District’s bus system). The current buses seat 16 passengers and have space for a wheelchair. There are bike racks on the fronts of the buses and they are all fitted with wheel chair lifts. New buses would be bigger. “We don’t want to promote too many new riders when some of the rush hour runs are already standing room only,” says Kack.

Lee Hazelbaker, supervisor of both Streamline and Galavan, who works out of the Bozeman Senior Center, says that traditional Galavan customers who are sufficiently mobile take the scheduled Streamline buses, cutting down a bit on demand for Galavan’s customized rides. Even so, Galavan averages about 90 rides a day, having extended the areas it serves. (While Mondays, Wednesday and Thursdays are limited to the Bozeman city limits, on Fridays people in Belgrade can request rides and on Tuesdays Galavan provides rides as far away as Three Forks.)

Vance Ruff, branch manager for Laidlaw, finds it a little hard to define how many new drivers were employed as a result of adding Streamline to the mix because many of Laidlaw’s school bus drivers added some Streamline driving hours to their mid-day off time. “Certainly adding the Streamline runs has helped me in recruiting drivers in this tight labor market,” he says. “We’re attracting new people because driving transit means they can work more hours.” And, he adds, “Some drivers would probably really rather drive transit than school buses because they don’t have to deal with discipline issues.”

I’ve spoken to many of the Streamline drivers in my explorations of the system (doing my best not to distract them as they drive). Being on a bus when they switch drivers is sometimes reminiscent of Pony Express days. A new driver shows up at the old Kenyon Noble with a school bus, relieving the previous driver so she can go do her school bus run. All the drivers I’ve met are friendly and appear to enjoy their interaction with riders, both newcomers and regulars. When a regular rider doesn’t show up at his usual stop, the drivers worry.

I asked David Kack if local public transportation officials had pitched the need for help financing the system to any of the developers proposing major new subdivisions in Bozeman or Belgrade. “Sure we have. The usual response is to offer to buy some buses for the fleet. Unfortunately, buying buses is not the answer. It’s the operating expenses that you have meet in order to expand the system and keep it attractive to riders. That’s where we need help.”

Here’s hoping – for all our sakes – we get that help from many sources.

(To see route maps and schedules for the bus system, go to www.streamlinebus.com)

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