The future of urban life.
This article appears in the January 2005 issue of Next American City magazine.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
for exclusive online access to our issue archives and more!
City roll call
Last Exit
Bus to Somewhere
I live in a small mountain resort town, where the biggest local employer is a ski resort. Last winter, an older woman who works at the resort wanted to go to the next town ten miles up valley to do Christmas shopping, but didn’t want to drive in the snow. She happened to stumble upon a bus schedule and decided to give the bus a try. This hadn’t been an option until two years ago, when a non-profit group I founded started a regional bus service.
I moved to Ketchum, Idaho, near the Sun Valley ski resort, from Seattle in 1996. Around that time, the Idaho state transportation department released a corridor study of a 30-mile stretch of the two-lane state highway, which is the valley’s only access route. The study outlined a proposal to widen the highway to five lanes. The local community prides itself on its distinct history and treasures the ease of rural small town life. When a limited-access freeway was proposed in the 1970s, locals protested the highway project, running the transportation department and its highway funds out of the valley for years after.
The residents did other things to keep the valley from becoming an undistinguished landscape dominated by sprawl, or as writer James Howard Kunstler would call it, a Nowhere. The county prohibited commercial development along the highway to stave off strip malls. Town zoning laws also prohibited chain stores until recently. Now we have a McDonalds and Starbucks, but they are within town limits and have a minimal impact on the streetscape. Limits on building size have kept big box stores from the edges of town.
The state presented its new proposal to widen the valley’s only artery with caution. While local residents did not embrace the project, organized opposition did not spring up as it had twenty years before. The valley’s population had grown and changed. Escalating property values encouraged many local employees to move further away, creating a population of commuters driving from their homes in one end of the valley to their jobs in the other on the increasingly clogged two-lane highway. To the average resident, building more lanes seemed to be the answer.
Some residents understood the simple supply and demand consequences of increasing road capacity. Demand will rise to meet the increase in supply, a phenomenon called induced traffic. “You can’t build your way out of congestion” has become a catchphrase for transportation planners and opponents of highway expansion. But people stuck commuting on the congested two-lane road didn’t want to hear it.
I began to attend public meetings, learning more about the issues, the history, and the players. My goal: to purposefully influence the process in order to ensure that Ketchum did not repeat the mistakes of other cities across the country. Being a young idealist, my initial solution was mass transit. In a linear corridor where most residences and businesses lie within a half-mile of the highway, a fast, frequent, reliable, and comfortable transit service could accommodate the same number of people in fewer vehicles, reducing congestion without widening.
At meetings, elected officials and involved citizens would toss out phrases like, “we need to encourage people to carpool” or “we need a transit service.” I didn’t see any action being taken, though, so four years into the debate I founded a non-profit to provide transportation options for the valley.
We started off promoting low-cost, low-infrastructure transportation modes like carpooling, biking, and walking. But two years in, people still needed a bus system. I met with the area’s two largest employers who told me that the high cost of housing necessitated mass transit to help recruit employees. In six months time I managed to start a regional commuter bus service operating on a shoestring budget.
After two years of service, we have proved that transit does work. In a valley with a population of about 15,000, there has been a forty percent growth in ridership, from 19,768 passengers per year to 27,944. But the bus’s future is not assured. The state determines local taxing authority, which saps the political will to commit to and invest in a more effective service. Local officials welcome and support our service, but they are happy to let an individual carry the burden instead of engaging in a regional planning process to build commitment.
In the meantime, an environmental impact statement on the expansion of the highway has been completed. Ten years ago, I opposed the addition of lanes. A few days ago, I stood before the state transportation board and told them I believed there was local agreement on the need for a four-lane highway as part of an integrated multi-modal transportation system. I haven’t sold out to road expansion; I realized I had to agree to some expansion in order to maintain support from the community and politicians for transit.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve created a monster and want to walk away. Then I step back and see what has been accomplished. The vision and persistence of a few can go a long way in a short time. People have figured out how to incorporate our limited, mainly peak-hour schedule into their regular routines whether they’re going to work, school, or the movies. Some only use it when they need to pick up their car from the repair shop. As for the woman who discovered the bus on that snowy day, she now regularly rides the bus to work.
REFERENCES
Association for Commuter Transportation
tmi.cob.fsu.edu/act/f_services.htm
Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals
Community Transportation Association of America
League of American Bicyclists
Walkable Communities
During, Alan Thein. “The Car and the City.” Seattle: Northwest Environment Watch, 1996.
Available at:
