State of the START
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
By Jake Nichols
Jackson Hole, Wyo.-For all of its driving, the START bus hasn’t gotten anywhere.
In recalling the early years of the public transportation Jacksonites now take for granted, Frank Ewing remembers when the fledgling operation was able to finally buy its first new bus. It was 1989, and START had moved into a little trailer office across from the fairgrounds.
The offices are still there, but some things have gotten better for the transit system. With 25 of its own buses, START no longer has to borrow Barker-Ewing rafting company’s 15-year-old shuttle buses to tote skiers to the Village for the winter season. Looking for a place to park the buses continues to be an ongoing effort, however.
There is good news. Total ridership for 2007 set another record as START carried more than 712,500 riders. In fact, since Michael Wackerly took over as administrator in 2002, START patronage has been up every year by an average of 17 percent. Already in 2008, Jackson’s bus is on pace to haul some 862,000 riders to Teton Village, across town, over the hill and down the canyon.
Bob Lenz, a town council member, would never have dreamed the little shuttle to Teton Village would have amounted to this.
“Back when we started we had one taxi in town,” Lenz recalled. “It was a big Ford station wagon run by Frank Jones. That was the only transportation in the valley.”
Lenz and other businessmen were eager to see a better connection between visiting skiers at the Village and things they could spend their money on in town.
Lenz, along with business owners Tom and Becky Shell, Tom Robbins, Harley Rolfe and others, approached the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce’s Bob Lalonde about getting funds from the town and county. A transportation committee was established, funds of $10,000 were eked out of local government budgets, and START was born in 1978.
Lenz recalls committee member Marie Case coming up with the name START, which stands for Southern Teton Area Rapid Transit. Another committeeman, Rick Hollingsworth, believes it was Jim Critchfield’s idea. The name stuck.
START carried 9,000 passengers that first year - all on winter runs to and from Teton Village. Jon Stainbrook, owner of Jackson’s infamous Wild West theatre, Dirty Jacks, was contracted to run the route six to eight times daily.
In the beginning, it wasn’t all peachy-keen for START. And there are some who question whether taxpayers should be subsidizing a mass transit system in Jackson Hole.
“There are people who think it’s a waste of tax dollars,” Hollingsworth said.
START currently receives 43 percent of its funding from the federal government under Federal Transit Administration guidelines. Another 23 percent of START’s budget comes from local government, 16 percent from fares and 13 percent from local business subsidies.
Through the 1980s, resistance to START came at both ends of the line.
“I can’t remember whether we got any money out of Paul McCollister,” Lenz said, referring to the then-Jackson Hole Ski Corp. president. “He probably wished the Town of Jackson didn’t exist.”
But the Village, at the time, had very little in the way of dining and nightly entertainment options. Skiers hankered for Jackson’s nightlife with no way into town.
“The Town thought it would steal their business,” Hollingsworth said. “They had a captive audience unless people had rented a car. There was a group of people that thought that it would just provide cheap transportation for Paul McCollister’s [benefit]. It was about ‘half for’ and ‘half against’ when we began.”
Frank Ewing managed START from 1985 through 1991. It was his buses they used in the old days - river shuttles that would otherwise have been garaged for the winter. “Obviously, the system is a great success today,” he said. “But it did not have unanimous support in those days. Nobody thought it was that critical. The town never wanted to lose share in the visitor base.”
Eventually, both the Town of Jackson and Teton Village got on the bus. Soaring ridership was hard to ignore. By 1991, when the town and county agreed to jointly manage START, the bus was carrying 177,000 riders up and down the Village road every ski season. To qualify for more federal aid, the bus began running year-round. In-town shuttle service was added in 2000, and a year later, with ridership doubling 1991 numbers, START was named the best transit system in Wyoming by Wyoming Public Transit Association.
With things looking up, the Town hired transit hotshot Michael Wackerly in 2002. Wackerly came highly regarded as the director of the Mansfield, Ohio, mass transit system for 25 years.
“I came out and saw the whole system and one thing came to my attention: We needed to improve the appearance of the buses,” he said about the day he interviewed for the job. “There were these two little moose buses that had the little cartoon moose on them. Other than that, everything else was just plain white with black letters on the side that said ‘Public Bus Service’ or something like that.”
Wackerly’s bus wraps drew immediate notice. The vinyl decals that completely envelope the Bluebird buses were an instant hit. Until people rode in them. “We can’t see out the windows,” was the main complaint.
Leading the charge was Robert “Captain Bob” Morris, a frequent political candidate for local office, a philanthropist and a strong voice on community issues. Morris’ letters to the editor in the local press either praise individual drivers for their smooth braking or bark about the hindered views.
“We’ve had complaints from a number of riders about that,” Wackerly said. “We still feel, and this is my belief, that the community as a whole likes the wraps. And that they’ve improved START’s image in the community.” Wackerly added that the concept was to advertise the community by choosing images that “demonstrated the soul of Jackson Hole.”
He is, however, willing to concede that unobstructed views are important to some riders. “[The wraps do] distort the vision inside the bus a little, so we’re going to try a new concept, where we try to leave at least 75 percent of the passenger windows open,” he said. “Hopefully that will be the best of both worlds. We’ll have a cool-looking bus, but the riders will still be able to see clearly outside.”
Each wrap costs $8,000 to $10,000 and lasts up to seven years - about half the life of the bus itself. In reanalyzing the funding process, Wackerly was able to rebid the project out to a firm that can do the job for less than $6,000 a bus. With federal funding no longer paying for the wraps, all buses will be 100 percent locally ‘wrapped.’ No corporate sponsorship mention is ever allowed outside the bus.
The START’s new bus shelters aren’t cheap, either.
The smaller bus stops run in the neighborhood of $35,000 to construct and install. A Canadian firm builds the shelters and KM Construction erects them. The larger bus stops - like those at Albertsons and the Days Inn - cost about $55,000.
“It’s one of those projects you think would be pretty simple until you try to do it,” Wackerly said. “You have the whole issue of getting the easements, so you have to work with the property owner. Then you have to go through the building permit process which, even for a shelter, is fairly complicated.”
By far, Wackerly’s biggest migraine is a lack of indoor storage for START buses. Currently, the fleet occupies a portion of the fairgrounds, across the street from the town and county’s maintenance buildings. Left to the ravages of a winter outdoors, the buses get cranky in the mornings, if they crank at all.
“Because the buses are stored outside, we can’t run biodiesel in the winter. It gets too cold,” Wackerly said. “We have to start the buses up two, three, sometimes four hours before we run them in the morning. When it is going to be 15 below or less, it’s now our standard policy to just let them run all night because it’s just too much trouble getting them started in the morning.”
Voters shot down START’s bid for $3 million of the Specific Purpose Tax in 2001. The money would have gone to buy more buses and help build a maintenance building. Morris, who was denied a seat on the START board for fear he would be derisive, said the vote was evidence of START’s mismanagement rather than a vote against mass transit in general.
Possible solutions to START’s lack of a real home have included some talk of relocating the facility down south to Hog Island near the Wyoming Department of Transportation. Wackerly said that move makes little financial sense. Getting buses into service from there would cost an additional $500,000 a year, he said.
The most radical solution is a proposed restructuring of Snow King Avenue. Wackerly was instructed by the town to explore the possibility of bunking with public works, sharing the town and county’s maintenance facility and garage. To accommodate START, the town is mulling over the idea of straightening Snow King Ave. to allow for more space on the south side of the road. The resulting reconfiguration would reduce the fairgrounds by as much as one-third of their present acreage and would also mean moving the entire rodeo arena.
“By the end of May we are going to have a cost estimate of what it would take to do that,” Wackerly said. “The preliminary study has shown that, in terms of space that it would create for us, it probably would work pretty well.”
Mayor Mark Barron has expressed interest in the plan, and Town Administrator Bob McLaurin, according to Wackerly, likes the idea of keeping all town and county heavy equipment under one roof.
Wherever START ends up, Wackerly hopes to have the new facility LEED Silver-certified, a nationally recognized system for environmentally-conscious building practices. The importance of the LEED certification is in keeping with the transit system’s commitment to pro-environmental standards. Solar-powered bus shelters, the use of biodiesel fuel and a dedication to reducing automobile trips in the valley are important to Wackerly. According to his statistics, START service reduces the miles driven by cars by more than 2.6 million vehicle miles, saving approximately 80,000 gallons of fuel and reducing carbon emissions by 1.3 million pounds each year.
Frank Ewing recalls the early years with a bittersweet fondness. “I felt fortunate to have the job, but I didn’t regret the end of it,” he said. Ewing would put in 20-hour days, seven days a week, as bus driver and bus mechanic. He remembers practically living in his insulated overalls.
“We’d finish that last run from the Village at one in the morning,” Ewing said. “We would stop and pick up fares at Calico Pizza or anywhere along the way. We never passed anyone by. By the time we got into Jackson, we sometimes had nearly 100 passengers on a 55-passenger bus.”
With fuel prices topping out at record levels and a growing trend toward eco-conservation, START could be packing them in all summer. The award-winning transit system without a home has come a long way - 500,000 miles a year - only to find itself right back where it started.
Courtesy photoA humble history.PERMALINK:
State of the START | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories
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