The bus stops here

Local transit providers team up

Some folks ’round here like to say that the Northwest Arkansas metro corridor is really one big city and no longer a collection of contiguous small towns. In some ways, that’s true. It’s no longer unusual for a person living in, say, Bella Vista, to drive to work every day in Springdale; or for a Fayetteville couple to have dinner and take in a movie or concert in Rogers. We even have school kids living in one town traveling every day to another to attend a private or open-enrollment charter school. City limit signs and county lines don’t mean what they used to mean.

But there are still a few areas where we don’t function as one city. Take mass transit.

Oh, there’s a regional bus service provider — Ozark Regional Transit — but it’s got a very challenging business model. It must rely on local governments, grants and rider fares to pay its way. That’s a pretty complicated chore, considering the number of different municipalities and county governments it must navigate, and please, to keep the dollars flowing.

Because it’s trying to serve a huge region without a reliable funding source, ORT routes are long and not very regular. Let’s face it, an efficient bus system is one in which riders don’t have to wait more than 15 minutes for the next ride to come along. The time between ORT stops can be much longer than that. So the service struggles with ridership, That, in turn, causes some of those government entities to balk at the amount of money they’re being asked to spend to keep ORT going.

Yet, for a growing metro area of more than 500,000 people, mass transit seems more like a necessity than a luxury. Good mass transit means fewer cars on already congested roads and cost savings for people who need to get efficiently from one place to another. So how do we get there?

Perhaps what’s going on in Fayetteville is an important next step. This week, ORT and Razorback Transit described how the two will cooperate by eliminating duplicated routes and sharing the job moving people where they need to go without cars. According to the plan, buses will run longer each day and more frequently, surely encouraging folks to use the service more often.

As its name implies, Razorback Transit is the service that uses buses to move University of Arkansas students, staff and faculty around Fayetteville. It’s wellused because parking is a rare commodity on campus.

Because it has a limited mission and geographic reach, Razorback Transit buses ran largely on time and ridership is not a problem. Funding comes mostly through the UA — rides are free — and it doesn’t have to negotiate with cranky city councils and quorum courts across several counties for survival.

The new arrangement between Razorback Transit and ORT, which begins rolling out Aug. 20, should be a benefit to folks who need to get around Fayetteville without adding another car to the traffic landscape. The one potential hitch is that ORT does charge riders fares while Razorback does not. With money tight, ORT can’t offer free rides without replacing the revenue.

That’s where the city of Fayetteville comes in. It would cost ORT about $25,000 the rest of 2018 if it were to eliminate fares. The City Council will consider making up that difference at a meeting next month. It seems worth a try, especially if the ORT/Razorback partnership can begin modeling how the entire region can improve mass transit.

Even if this new approach is wildly successful in Fayetteville, it’s far from the regional solution many see as an imperative. But by simply working together for the benefit of mass transit riders in Fayetteville, these two providers are completing one portion of the larger puzzle. It’s still going to take a broad regional effort to finish it off (are you listening, Northwest Arkansas Council?), but you can’t complete the route without making that first stop.