By Chris Zeilinger
When a Small Town has Great Transit
January 14, 2025
In the U.S. transit geography, there’s a distinction between urban areas with populations above 50,000 and areas with populations below 50,000. A major part of this is that the federal transit funding allocated to areas above 50,000 is much more generous than what’s made available to states to help support transit in their rural places and urban areas with populations less than 50,000.
But there’s more to the story: larger communities are more likely to have the wherewithal to support robust transit than smaller communities. And there’s the consideration that rural areas’ lower populations often lack the types of concentrated travel demand that best support frequent fixed-route bus service.
Nevertheless, there are quite a few rural areas with levels of highly used, intensive transit service that compare admirably with their more populous urban counterparts. To help make this chapter easier to read, by the way, we’re using the term “rural” rather loosely, generally referring to any place that’s not an urban area with more than 50,000 population.
High Ridership at High Altitude
A half-dozen rural transit systems in Colorado routinely provide more than a million unlinked passenger trips (UPT) per year. But one of these – the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA) – stands out above the rest. Its ridership is consistently higher than any other rural transit system in the US. What’s more, RFTA’s ridership is higher than every transit system serving urban areas under 200,000 population.
If the Roaring Fork valley (which includes Aspen, Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs and Snowmass Village) were one urban area, its population would be an estimated 42,224. Last year, RFTA provided 4.6 million trips. The ridership of local public transit systems in Glenwood Springs and Snowmass Village increased that total to 5.3 million trips, which works out to 125.44 UPT per capita. The only area in the US with more unlinked passenger trips per capita is New York City!
High Ridership at Sea Level
The town of Ocean City, Md., (urban area pop. 37,946) has only one bus route, running along the one through street in town. But what a route it is! Even in the winter months, Ocean City’s “Beach Bus” runs on 30-minute headways from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., seven days a week, with even longer hours and greater frequency in the summer months. Last year, there were nearly 1.3 million boardings of the Beach Bus, for an impressive 34.19 UPT per capita. That’s more trips per capita than are amassed by TriMet, C-Tran, and all their fellow transit agencies in the Portland Ore./Vancouver, Wash., urban area.
An Abundance of Transit Ridership in Appalachia
Moving to another elevated area, there are many inspiring instances of transit in North Carolina and Tennessee near the Great Smoky Mountains and the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The city of Asheville, N.C., (urban area population 285,776) has a fairly solid urban transit system (1.4 million trips in 2023, plus 113,858 urban transit trips provided by Buncombe County’s transit service). Not far from Asheville, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ Cherokee Transit program is one of the above-average tribal transit operations in the U.S.
However, let’s cast our eyes over the mountains to Pigeon Forge Tenn., where Pigeon Forge Mass Transit provided 2.1 million trips in 2023, mostly within this small city of 6,343 population, plus one route into neighboring Sevierville (pop. 17,889), as well as service to Dollywood, Dollywood’s Splash Country, Dolly Parton’s Stampede, and other tourist destinations clustered in and around Pigeon Forge.
Collectively, this means that transit ridership in the Sevierville urban area (pop. 34,032), of which Pigeon Forge is a part, was 50 percent greater than ridership in Asheville, and the Sevierville area received 62.07 UPT per capita last year, comparable more to the intensity of transit service in Ames, Iowa (68.47 UPT per capita) than to Asheville’s 5.60 UPT per capita.
Back in North Carolina, the city of Boone, with 26,306 people living in its urban area, is home to AppalCART. Operated as part of Watauga County government, AppalCART’s 16 routes provide 1.5 million UPT wholly within the urban area containing Boone and its immediately adjacent areas. That’s an impressive 54.34 UPT per capita, about the same intensity of transit as we see in Boston, Mass.
Why would a city the size of Boone have a transit service whose 38 buses cover 16 routes (plus complementary paratransit), mostly on 15-minute headways, delivering 1.5 million trips per year? Being fare-free helps generate ridership, but the real answer is found in three words: Appalachian State University. Every one of those 16 routes serves the ASU campus. However, AppalCART’s ridership also includes plenty of other Boone residents who use the buses to get to work (including many off-campus jobs), go shopping, access social and community services, etc.
Achieving Urban Greatness in Rural Transit: Lessons Learned
Whether it’s Ocean City, Md., Pigeon Forge, Tenn., Boone, N.C., the Aspen-Glenwood Springs corridor of Colorado, or other places under 50,000 population with heavy transit use, we start to see patterns of how transit demand can lead to great transit.
Tourist Destinations
Many of the highest-ridership rural transit systems in the U.S. are in tourist areas, especially ones that may be expensive (especially if there’s a need to assure workers’ access to their jobs) and/or exposed to otherwise-crippling traffic congestion (e.g. ski areas, beach communities). This group’s high performers include:
- Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, Colo. (4.6 million UPT in 2023)
- Mountain Village Transit, Colo. (3.2 million UPT)
- Town of Vail Transit, Colo. (2.6 million UPT)
- Pigeon Forge Mass Transit, Tenn. (2.1 million UPT)
- Park City Transit, Utah (1.9 million UPT)
- Summit Stage, Colo. (1.4 million UPT)
- Core Transit (Eagle Valley Transportation Authority), Colo. (1.4 million UPT)
- Town of Ocean City Transportation, Md. (1.3 million UPT)
- Steamboat Springs Transit, Colo. (1.2 million UPT)
- High Valley Transit District, Utah (1.2 million UPT)
- Hele-On (Hawai’i County Mass Transit Agency), Hawai’i (1.0 million UPT)
College Communities
Similar to what we see in larger urban areas, when there is a rural community that’s home to a four-year college or university having at least 10,000 students, the conditions are right for some great transit. Around the U.S., there are 32 university campuses having at least 10,000 students in areas whose populations are less than 50,000. With the exception of BYU-Idaho in Rexburg, all those high-enrollment rural universities have some form of transit service. Only eight of these large rural universities’ transit programs are restricted to their own students, faculty and staff; most are open to the public (and receive some level of federal transit assistance).
In addition to Spokane Transit’s service to Eastern Washington University’s 10,915-student campus in Cheney, Wash., (discussed previously in Chapter 5), and AppalCART’s service in and around Boone, N.C., and Appalachian State University (21,570 students) presented above, the other stand-out examples of blended public and university transit in rural America are:
- Pullman, Wash. (urban area pop. 32,691) & Washington State University (20,976 students at its Pullman campus): the city-operated Pullman Transit provided 763,833 trips in 2023 (23.37 UPT/capita)
- Oxford, Miss. (urban area pop. 33,518) & the University of Mississippi (24,710 students): the city-operated Oxford-University Transit provided 512,267 trips (15.28 UPT/capita)
- Starkville, Miss. (urban area pop. 32,812) & Mississippi State University (22,649 students at its campus adjoining Starkville): the university-operated SMART public transit provided 477,655 trips (14.56 UPT/capita)
- Laramie, Wyo. (urban area pop. 32,261) & the University of Wyoming (10,813 students): the university-operated Roundup public transit provided 365,421 trips (11.33 UPT/capita)
- Athens, Ohio (urban area pop. 37,355) & Ohio University (18,502 students at its Athens campus): the city’s Athens Transit program, operated by the Hocking-Athens-Perry Community Action Partnership (HAPCAP), provided 271,027 trips (7.26 UPT/capita)
- Stillwater, Okla. (urban area pop. 48,237) & Oklahoma State University (26,805 students): the university-operated OSU-Stillwater Community Transit provided 299,727 trips (6.21 UPT/capita)
- Mt. Pleasant, Mich. (in Isabella County, which has 64,394 people) & Central Michigan University (14,423 students): the county-wide Isabella County Transportation Commission provided 308,892 trip (4.80 UPT/capita)
- Brookings, S.D. (in Brookings County, which has 34,375 people) & South Dakota State University (11,465 students): the county-wide Brookings Area Transit Authority provided 143,863 trips in 2023 (4.19 UPT/capita)
Without wanting to brag too loudly about great rural transit, let’s just note that the 4.19 trips per capita in Brookings, S.D. compares favorably to the 4.13 trips per capita reported by Indianapolis’s IndyGo public transit service, even though Brookings County has only 1/50 the population of the Indianapolis urban area.
Solving the Puzzles of Great Rural Transit
The ten instances cited above aren’t the only examples of how to blend university and general public transit in ways that help make great communities in rural America, and there are many other cases of partnerships between rural transit systems and the colleges or universities in the communities they serve.
Moreover, being in a major tourist area, or in a rural university community, is not a necessary condition for having great transit in a place with fewer than 50,000 residents (for instance, here’s looking at you, Danville, Ill.!).
In any case, you’ll recall that one of the key factors in helping communities of all sizes achieve greatness with their public transit is the strength of local support, both financially and institutionally. We’ll explore that aspect of great transit in the next chapter.
The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) and its members believe that mobility is a basic human right. From work and education to life-sustaining health care and human services programs to shopping and visiting with family and friends, mobility directly impacts quality of life.