Summit Stage to cut routes

The Summit Stage has proposed cutting back its midday bus service on many routes because of rising fuel costs, and directors said at their meeting Wednesday they may have to implement fares as a last resort.

“We face an approximate deficit of $630,000 by year’s end. Most of that is due to the rapid increase of fuel,” said John Jones, Summit Stage transit director. “There’s only one way to save fuel, and that’s to turn off the engines.”

The free service will scale back from two buses each hour to one on its Breckenridge-to-Frisco, Silverthorne-to-Keystone, Silverthorne, Boreas Pass and Wildernest routes between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. for the summer months, pending approvaly by the county commissioner.

“These were the cuts that made the most sense, looked as though they cause the least pain,” Jones said.

Normal operations will resume for ski season, though that has been tentatively pushed back from the week before Thanksgiving to Dec. 7.

“I don’t want to just modify service and think that it’s a solution,” said Stage chairman Kent Willis. “To me, this is just a short-term thing. We need to be looking at ways to put these services back in place.”

The buses consume about 30,000 gallons of fuel a month.

Jones figured on an average of $3.25 a gallon for fuel in his budget, or about $850,000 for the year. Current diesel costs are now about $4.42 a gallon, which comes to more than $1 million for the year, he said.

The reduction of 252 trips a week will save at least $350,000, according to a staff report.

“This is not something I want to do,” Jones said. “It’s the transit director looking at conditions and saying that I can’t continue to run the system like that. Good business practices dictate that we can’t continue to run a deficit like this. I’m between a rock and a very hard place. These fuel costs totally blind-sided us.”

Summit Stage has already implemented idle controls, which shut engines off after 5 minutes, and top-speed controls. Jones said the service is already 8 drivers understaffed.

However, if fuel prices continue to go up, the Summit Stage may be making an unprecedented move: transistioning from free to fare.

Jones said he hopes to avoid this change for numerous reasons.

First, the county has fought hard to keep the Stage free.

Second, purchasing and installing fare-collection systems would cost $14,000 per vehicle.

To recoup these expenses would take 11 months of charging a median fare of $.75 per ride, Jones said.

He also said that fares would never completely pay for the bus system but merely would provide additional revenue.

The third, perhaps most pressing, reason is that the Stage would stand to lose 600,000 rides per year on a system that gets 2.4 million rides annually, according to staff estimates.

The number of rides would likely bounce back, but that could take at least two years, Jones said.

Another possibility to account for fuel costs, instead of charging a fare, is to increase the county sales tax a quarter of a percent, commissioner Bob French said.

The planned new fleet and transit maintenance facility has placed an additional strain on the Summit Stage budget to the tune of $12 million.

The old building, built in 1974, cannot handle more than three buses at a time and often suffers from a water-covered floor in run-off months.

The new facility would have six bus bays and all county vehicles will receive maintenance there. Summit Stage would pay for about half the facility’s costs.

K.J. Hascall can be contacted at (970) 668-4653, or at khascall@summitdaily.com.