Five years of data shows the state’s largest transit system is approaching an inflection point on the back of haywire trends.

By Will Guisbond

As Green Mountain Transit brings back urban bus fares for the first time since 2020, the agency appears buffeted by competing pressures: the need for revenue, the desire to retain riders and a worry that people who stick around will be worse off. Now agency leaders say not only will services likely be cut but fare increases will also continue. 

“I think that there’s a very good chance that, in the next six months as we start seeing what revenue is coming in from fares, that we may need to do some adjustments,” said Clayton Clark, GMT general manager, noting that fares for the main intercity services in and around Burlington will go up if that revenue goal is not met. 

Five years of data analyzed by Community News Service shows the state’s largest transit system is approaching that inflection point on the back of haywire trends.

Green Mountain Transit eliminated fares across the state at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking a way to help Vermonters cope with the crisis while fighting the virus’ spread — without fares, passengers could enter the back of the bus and avoid walking past rows of people. Backed by federal funds, GMT kept rides free in 2020 and 2021, but facing grim finances, the agency started thinking about bringing fares back. GMT leaders asked legislators for money to keep services going while they planned the resumption. Lawmakers obliged, giving GMT more than $2 million over the next two years to maintain services while keeping them free. 

Legislators’ latest bailout, in 2023, came with a caveat: In return for $850,000, GMT needed to bring back fees in 2024 and make up 10% of its revenue in fares. That condition has set the stage for the tumult GMT leaders now face as they look to reinstate fares on May 20 — although even the provider’s own budget doesn’t anticipate meeting 10%, expecting fares to only account for about 8%. 

Ridership data from September 2018 to February 2024, provided to CNS by GMT, shows while some areas of the system boasted healthier ridership, others have seen mixed results.

Take April, one of the few months that might be least subject to fluctuations triggered by school breaks and holidays. A 14-day period in April 2023 saw significantly higher ridership than the same timeframe in 2019, suggesting more people may have chosen to take advantage of the free bus rides. 

But across other two-week periods with similar conditions, that trend falls apart — showing ridership was not necessarily higher post-pandemic because of the elimination of fares. Above all, the numbers show ridership still hasn’t fully returned to pre-pandemic levels.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WhUtw/6/

“I think if we had done a fare-free experiment not in conjunction with a global pandemic, maybe we would have seen a different result,” said Jamie Smith, GMT’s director of planning and marketing, “but we definitely saw, which was an industry standard, a pretty large drop in ridership (after going fare-free).”

The data also shows how reliant GMT’s service is on certain groups of people, like students. Distinct drops — and rises — in ridership are evident across the data when college students leave for or return from school breaks. Holiday seasons and even an unexpected shift in weather could affect overall ridership.

The data also isn’t exactly reliable, Smith said, considering drivers use a keypad to manually count riders given that fare boxes haven’t been touched since 2020. That, in conjunction with multiple known outages in GMT’s data communication system, are most likely responsible for large “peaks and valleys” in the data, Smith said.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/UL0Mf/6/

Making service ‘worse’

The drop in ridership from pre-pandemic levels — and subsequent lack of revenue — is something seen across the industry, according to Clark, a fact that is forcing GMT to cut about 30% of its service later this year even if it meets that 10% revenue goal, as first reported by The Williston Observer.

Clark told CNS that the only situation where those service cuts could be avoided would be if GMT received two and a half times the revenue it’s expecting currently. Currently, GMT is budgeting for fare revenues to take up about 8.2% of its budget for fiscal year 2025 (about $1.6 million). “I just think that’s unlikely that we’ll see a surge of use when the costs go back,” Clark said. 

Professor Dana Rowangould, who studies public transportation in the University of Vermont Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, laid out the domino effect: Losing ridership leads to lost revenue, and lost revenue often means cut routes and hours.

“The people who have the resources to do something else can leave, and the people who don’t have those resources are stuck with this service that’s getting worse,” she said. “And then the more people leave, the worse it gets. It’s like a cycle.”

Rowangould and doctoral student Parsa Pezeshknejad have been researching the dynamic since 2020, understanding the pandemic accelerated that self-perpetuating cycle of inequitable transit options. They’ve published several studies in that time and are working on another. So far their findings are overwhelmingly clear: Things like quality of service have become more important to people since the pandemic has receded, an increasingly difficult reality to adapt with as transit agencies like GMT struggle financially. 

Surveying transit riders in Toronto and Vancouver in the fall of 2022, Rowangould and Pezeshknejad found that 70% of respondents believed the pandemic was “here to stay,” suggesting people’s changed transit habits had been permanently morphed (due to the global increase in remote work options, for example). When the survey was conducted, 13% said they had no plans to return to using public transit. 

Clark said GMT leaders hope the new fare system will at least ease the burden for frequent riders. The transit authority is rolling out a fare cap of $50 per month, meaning that if you ride the urban route twice a day, it would only take you about 13 days before the rest of your rides for that month are free. 

“The new system will, in a sense, protect the people that use the service the most,” Clark said.

Rowangould said she was sad to hear GMT was considering further fare increases to combat worsening service. She had hoped years of federal relief dollars being pumped into the transit industry would help agencies “ride out the storm.”

But now those funds have dried up. “I’m unfortunately not surprised (about  future fare increases),” Rowangould said. “You know, their hands are tied.”

Will Guisbond performed the data analysis in this story in partnership with Mikaela Fudolig, a research assistant professor in math and statistics. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.