Scott Swanson
Linn Shuttle will launch a new bus service next Wednesday, Oct. 1, in response to increasing demand for its Dial-a-Bus.
Manager Ken Bronson said the new bus will be called the Sweet Home Shopper and will serve riders three days a week throughout Sweet Home, making sweeping loops to the city limits both to the west and to the east, with stops throughout the downtown area.
The reason for the new route, he said, is that Dial-a-Bus, an address-specific transportation service, cannot meet the demand for its services.
“For the 4½ years I’ve been here, Dial-a-Bus has been overbooked and above capacity,” Bronson said. “The elderly and disabled have priority, but with 70 percent of the Dial-a-Bus ridership being elderly and disabled doesn’t leave much opportunity for the general public to use our system. So we’re starting Sweet Home Shopper.”
The actual ridership for Dial-a-Bus has actually dropped, he said, but service hours have increased about 12 percent and service mileage – the distance the buses actually travel each week – is up about 15 percent over when Bronson began managing the shuttle service in late 2010.
“We’re driving more miles, but the big thing is that we’re carrying over 70 percent elderly and disabled now,” he said. “When I started it was 52 percent.”
A major reason for those numbers is that in 2010 the regular East Linn Shuttle buses did not go east of 18th Avenue. In 2011 Bronson expanded the shuttle routes to Foster Lake and has since steadily improved schedules so riders can link with other bus routes.
“Now we go all the way to the lake, so we catch a lot of people who would use Dial-a-Bus just to get to the shuttle,” he said. “As soon as we gave them another option, they took it.”
Shuttle ridership has risen steadily as well, from 27,590 in 2010-11 to 57,561 in 2012-13 and 67,865 in the 2013-14 fiscal year which ended June 30.
“Ridership is 2½ times what it was when I started,” Bronson noted.
To keep up with the demand, Linn Shuttle has two propane-powered buses on order, and Bronson said one of the existing buses will be used for the Sweet Home Shopper.
Money for the new service, which is budgeted at $36,000 – 5 percent of Linn Shuttle’s total $679,208 budget for 2014-15 – will come from several sources: $7,200 from the City of Sweet Home and $10,000 from the county, which Bronson said he is “leveraging” for federal money.
The Shopper service will run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays starting at 9 a.m. at the Community Center and operating through 3 p.m. Start times at the Senior Center will be 9, 10 and 11:30 a.m., and 12:30, 2 and 3 p.m. Buses are scheduled to return to their home base 50 minutes after their departures.
Bronson cautioned that the new service will be a work in progress, so times and other details will be adjusted as the need arises.
The bus will run three times a day, through a west loop that will include Elm Street and the avenues, then Thriftway, Sweet Home Family Medicine, the post office, City Hall, the library, Safeway and Bi-Mart. It will then swing east along Main Street to Foster Lake, then back on Long Street to the Community Center. The bus will not go beyond the city limits.
Rides will cost $1 each way. Pick-ups will be at specific times, at specific locations, so appointments will not be necessary.
“The focus is on hitting the major population areas, the density – apartment complexes, mobile homes, other residential areas, and linking those to the businesses and services of Sweet Home.”
For more information, visit http://www.linnshuttle.com or call (541) 367-4775.