CAT buses can’t keep pace with valley’s rapid growth

Thursday, Sept. 23, 1999 | 11:01 a.m.

Citizens Area Transit is the nation's most rapidly growing bus system, expanding five times faster than the Las Vegas Valley's population.

Yet some riders say it still isn't growing fast enough.

"Maryland Parkway -- it's crowded as hell," Las Vegas bus passenger Robert Lee said. "And the Jones (Boulevard) bus runs every hour. It would be better every half hour."

No news there for Citizens Area Transit officials, said Ingrid Yocum, spokeswoman for the Clark County Regional Transportation Commission that runs CAT.

"We realize there are some hour routes that need to be every half an hour or every 20 minutes," Yocum said. "But we're just trying to keep up with the growth, not expand service. That's hard to explain to a customer who needs a route every 30 minutes."

The valley's population increases about 6 percent a year, but the bus system has been growing 30 percent to 35 percent annually since it opened in 1992.

Last year an average of 127,500 passengers climbed onto a CAT bus every day. This year the daily average has climbed to 150,000, Yocum said. It's more than the number of people who pass through McCarran International Airport on an average day.

Adding a route here, a bus there or another stop costs a lot of money. Many such requests are perfectly sensible, but few are financially feasible, Yocum said.

Changing an hourly route to one where riders can catch a bus every 30 minutes costs almost $360,000 a year. Starting a brand-new route costs almost $600,000, Yocum said.

Neither of these amounts includes the purchase of a bus to do the extra work. Those cost about $275,000 a piece.

This year CAT received $2.4 million in federal air quality improvement money to add express routes along six major corridors, Yocum said. These buses are to be available every 20 to 30 minutes from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

The actual routes have not been drawn up yet. But the general corridors being considered are along Rancho Drive, Sunset Road, the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard and Rancho, Eastern, Sahara and Tropicana avenues.

Royce Coats, a Las Vegas resident who waited at a Charleston Boulevard bus stop one day last week, says some buses are so crowded people have to wait for the next one. That can mean 30 minutes or more depending on which route is involved.

And that matters to Coats who, like 80 percent of CAT riders, is a resident needing to get to work or appointments on time. This isn't a tourist-oriented bus system.

"I travel by bus everywhere I go. I don't want to drive in this town," Coats said.

For the most part Coats says she can get to the places she wants to go in a reasonable amount of time. But there are glitches here and there, especially on weekends.

"On weekends it takes longer to get around. You have to wait a long time. I've had them pass me up. A lot of them are out of service," she said.

In December 1992 CAT buses began operating as a mass transit system designed for residents' use. Before that buses mainly toted tourists up and down The Strip.

The system had 18 routes and 130 buses the first year compared to the 296 buses that carry passengers on 42 routes today. By 1994 the system was ranked 115th nationally in terms of size, and Yocum says CAT now ranks 27th.

"We're almost growing too fast. There's so much demand, and there aren't enough revenue sources," Yocum said.

If national trends are any indication the growth likely will continue, said Amy Coggin, a spokeswoman for the American Public Transit Association.

The association, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit professional group that tracks trends in the public transit industry.

"There's been a steady growth for three years, which overturned a trend that goes back to the end of World War II," Coggin said. "A lot of that is with smaller bus systems and with the rail systems."

Trends in the East and West are about the same, refuting a long-held assumption that people in the West love their cars too much to ride a bus or train, she said. In addition to Las Vegas, metropolitan areas of Texas also are seeing huge increases in public transit use.

"There's been a lot of growth in Texas in light and commuter rail. That has exceeded all predictions that they'd never get out of their cars," Coggin said. "They will leave their cars for good quality public transportation."

Nationally transit growth rates hover around 4 to 6 percent a year. The annual increases Clark County's transit system has seen in recent years are abnormally high and hard to sustain, she said.

Riders eventually will have to do without route expansions and vast scheduling changes.

"You have to go through some tremendous growing pains at that level," Coggin said. "But those are good growing pains."

Robert Peppard, who lives in Las Vegas' Peccole Ranch, isn't so sure about that. He said a route leading well north and west of his neck of the woods is long overdue.

Peppard says CAT's east-west routes run much farther into the valley's eastern suburbs than they do into the newer, and in many cases more affluent, western neighborhoods.

Of the 18 east-west routes listed on CAT's Internet site five go as far as the eastern fringes of Summerlin and one -- the 210 along Lake Mead Boulevard -- extends as far as Town Center Drive.

"I actually believe it's high-tech segregation," Peppard said. "They don't want people riding out there."

Transit officials know the northwest area is underserved, Yocum said. North Las Vegas also needs more routes, more buses and shorter waits on existing routes. And Blue Diamond residents soon will need a route too.

There just isn't enough money to meet those increasing demands right now, Yocum said.

In October and November transit officials are hosting eight public outreach meetings in area shopping malls to find the biggest voids and figure out what kinds of services can be added or altered to help people who can't find a manageable bus route.

But to say that CAT is systematically excluding certain populations is ridiculous, Yocum said. All customers count. In other metropolitan areas about 35 percent of a transit system's budget comes from fare boxes. But almost half of CAT's budget comes from fares.

Excluding people makes no sense.

"We're not trying to keep anybody out of Summerlin. We even added a stop for the Resort at Summerlin," Yocum said.