Alert readers of the Daily Sentinel will recall the recent and well-written article by Mike Wiggins on the state of finances for Mesa County's Grand Valley Transit and the exasperation of the city of Grand Junction at being asked to pour more money into the operation.
There are several obvious shock points that leapt out at the gentle reader, such as their plans to build a $4 million administrative office complex and "transfer station" and the staggeringly poor showing of having its costs covered by riders at only 9%.
There is another very important question lurking within the figures that this writer discovered while working on a similar proposal in Boulder a number of years ago. As part of attempts to convince us on the student funding board of the bus company's popularity, they provided us with figures of the number of rides taken in the Boulder area.
This figure quickly became translated as "riders" which was used for the purpose of determining the possible baseline of consumers as well as a per "rider" cost.
The flaw in this that I had noted at the time was that rides generally are two-way. That is if someone rides the bus somewhere, normally they come back. This leads to a vastly decreased number of "riders" and a commensurately increased cost per individual to whom the service is provided.
I therefore am interested in how the ridership figures are tallied. This is something we will look into and report back. In the meantime, let's just say that we on this page disagree with the well-meaning editorial position of the Sentinel that the funding for this situation continue at the present level without much more inquiry into the overhead and mission of the agency.
Anecdotally, I often see full-sized Grand Valley Transit buses driving throughout the Valley with few or no people on board. This Friday at four o'clock I noted a full-size Grand Valley Transit bus near the Mall with one person on board.
I can only speculate at the response one might get at driving an extremely large vehicle endlessly around the area with only one or two occupants. Think of the global warming consequences alone.
No more blank checks.
