With empty buses, Mountain Line changing plans

MISSOULA — While waiting at a bus stop in East Missoula, Stephen Hopkins, 57, rubbed his hands together on the chilly October morning. If he missed the Mountain Line bus, he’d have to wait an hour before another came to take him to Walmart.

“It’s a cold one today,” Hopkins said. “I really need to get stuff done.”

Hopkins said he’s ridden the bus nearly every day for 14 years. To make ends meet, he doesn’t own a car. That means risking potential delays.

“I’ve had the driver pass me by accidentally and missed it,” Hopkins said. “It messes up my whole day.”

Officials at Mountain Line say they are working to improve the lives of riders like Hopkins with their new Transit Strategic Plan. The plan, last revised in 2018, aims to adjust routes to be more efficient and equitable.

During a September Transportation Technical Advisory Committee meeting, Mountain Line Transit Planner Spencer Starke shared how they’d like to remove bus lines that serve the Target Range and South Hills neighborhoods to add more frequent service where ridership is more popular.

“We need to adjust our service to the ridership that we’re seeing,” Starke said. “This is about optimizing our existing service within our existing capacity.”

Mountain Line planners gave two possibilities for what bussing could look like next year. The biggest changes would be removing Route 9 and parts of Route 12 that serve neighborhoods west of Reserve Street and the South Hills. This would free up resources to create a new line serving the Sx ʷtpqyen area and improve frequency to the Northside and East Missoula, according to the transit agency.

In lieu of Route 9, which connects Target Range to downtown, Mountain Line may offer an on-demand service similar to Lyft or Uber. Mountain Line CEO Jordan Hess said the service would still be free for riders and more efficient. This is because Route 9 is only offered for a few hours during popular commute times, while the on-demand service could run all day.

“If you want to go somewhere at 7:30 a.m. that’s doable, but if you want to go somewhere at noon, you’re waiting until the afternoon,” Hess said. “This would be a different kind of service. It wouldn’t be walking out to the corner and waiting for the fixed-drop bus. It would be requesting a ride and receiving that ride within half-an-hour.”

Hess said a reduction in Route 12 is needed because there are many challenges bus drivers face in navigating the South Hills, particularly in winter. Additionally, there is an added expense when maintenance crews are asked to remove snow from the narrow and steep streets.

The proposed changes are based on an analysis of ridership and similar cities that have added on-demand services. These cities included Flagstaff Arizona, Ashland Oregon, and Lyndon Washington. Hess said Mountain Line would likely implement a pilot program for on-demand next year before a wide-spread rollout.

A reporter recently rode on the Route 9 bus for several hours, all without seeing another rider. Mountain Line’s data supports this, showing that in October of 2023, that route averaged about nine riders each hour.

In contrast, Route 4, which travels from East Missoula to downtown, averaged more than double the riders during that same time. While total ridership on Mountain Line was measured at around 1.1 million last year, it is still recovering from a drop during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, ridership was around 1.5 million.

Hess said he wants the TSP to improve ridership by being more equitable to lower-income neighborhoods.

“I wonder if we need to focus more on who is riding,” Hess said. “To me, it’s really about the people behind it. The people who use it, the people who operate it, and asking if we are providing a service that people really need.”

Riders on Route 4 would be one of the likely winners from the new plan, with both scenarios shortening the wait between rides from an hour to 30 minutes. One of those would-be winners is Jah Castillo, 21, who frequently uses the bus to see his girlfriend in East Missoula.

“There’s a lot of benefits to this change,” Castillo said. “If I wanted to grab a notebook or something, I’d have to spend an hour out here and wait around. I could save a lot of time.”

Castillo also said that his partner has been late to work several times because she missed the bus.

“She’s had to walk for hours to get to downtown,” Castillo said. “With the temperatures dropping, I think the more frequent stops is a lot better.”

Mountain Line hosted a series of open houses in September to hear from the community about the TSP, and took more than 600 public comments on an online survey.

Officials are working through that data, and Hess said the public can expect communication about the revised plans to be published sometime in November or December.

Once a new TSP is adopted, the first changes will likely be implemented in the summer of 2025. To stay up-to-date with updates to the TSP, visit the Engage Missoula website.