Mountain is reinstating its standard 75-cent fare for riders aboard its Don Knotts Route starting Sunday.
The move comes in conjunction with the launch of a pass program for individuals needing to access social services.
The line, which has been free for all riders regardless of destination since September 2022, travels from Mountain Line’s Pifer Terminal to downtown Morgantown, then out to Scott Avenue, the Hornbeck Road Walmart and back.
Starting Sunday, anyone needing transportation to Hazel’s House of Hope, on Scott Avenue, or any other service provider, will need to get a Community Access Pass.
These one-use passes were purchased in bulk by the city of Morgantown at a discounted rate of 67 cents each and will be available at the Morgantown Public Library, the Morgantown Public Safety Building, from city ambassadors and police officers.
The passes will come packaged with a handout detailing Mountain Line routes in correlation to the area’s various social service providers.
On the other end of the ride, the Monongalia County Commission has put up $5,000 to allow agencies to offer passes to get individuals to their next destination. Agencies have also been educated on the various other Mountain Line pass programs their clients may be eligible for.
As has been reported, the blanket free ridership on Don Knotts has become untenable.
In 2021, 22,412 trips were provided — 9,506 of which came in the four months after the normal 75-cent fare was eliminated. Mountain Line charged $25,000 for the service based on the route’s historic ride data. A group of contributors, including the city of Morgantown and Monongalia County, came together to cover the cost.
In 2022, with free ridership in place, the number of riders jumped to 45,744.
Morgantown Community Resources, the nonprofit that serves as landlord and facilitator for Hazel’s House of Hope, was able to obtain a grant to cover the $34,428 (45,744 rides x 75 cents) to keep the service going in 2023.
But the numbers nearly doubled again in 2023, with 87,442 trips provided.
This year, 71,237 free trips have been provided through October, including an all-time high 9,195 in October alone.
Back in March, Mountain Line CEO Maria Smith told local stakeholders it would take $65,646 to keep the route free past the June 30 end of the fiscal year.
She also said the remedy was becoming unsustainable and was in no way representative of the actual need.
A short time later, the city of Morgantown put up $33,000 to keep the route free until a new solution could be put in place.
Smith explained the purpose of this pass program is to be able to continue to provide free transportation to those who need it while also getting an indication of what the actual need is.
Using geospatial mapping, Mountain Line determined that only a percentage of the riders taking advantage of the free service were getting picked up or dropped off at social service agencies.
Some were riding the bus just to ride the bus.
This program will give riders access to Mountain Line’s entire network, not just a single route. Further, it comes with a data collection component that will inform future efforts.
“The idea behind both (city/county) programs is so that we will have data at the end … We can look at the kind of passes the social service agencies are ordering, the types of passes, how many they’re ordering. It will give us a much better feel for how much they actually need, how much they’re actually riding,” Smith told the Mountain Line Transit Board.
“On the back end, we can look and see what passes are used, which ones are not used. There’s a lot more information that we’ll be able to gather, so at the end of this we can say, ‘This is the dollar amount we need to support the people most in need in our community.’ We’ll have a basis to work from.”
Transit Board President Jenny Dinsmore thanked Smith for doing the heavy lifting and her colleagues on the board for giving Smith the time to pull it all together.
“It’s come a long way. It’s been months. Other than the funding and meeting with the funding bodies, she was expected to not just provide service, but to design and market the program, which was a lot for Mountain Line, and probably beyond the call of what we should have been doing,” Dinsmore said. “I think it’s going to work. There will be some bugs, but it’s going to work.”
