OR: New transit leader looks to boost underused Central Oregon bus system

After Bob Townsend’s 25 years managing Central Oregon area projects for the Oregon Department of Transportation, he felt the region had reached a tipping point. There would always be highway improvements to make, but the area’s most pressing transportation problems like congestion could only be solved by getting people to travel on the bus.

“I didn’t switch over lightly,” Townsend, who took over as director of Cascades East Transit in September, told a Bend-area transportation committee in December. “I switched over because I thought this was an area, as I finish out the last five to eight years of my career, where we could have the most significant transportation benefits in Central Oregon.”

As Central Oregon’s population has grown, transit has lagged behind. It’s still years away from becoming the optimal service it has the potential to be, Townsend said.

Bend transportation plan looks to accommodate 40,000 more people

But he feels Bend’s bus system is in a good position to grow ridership in 2025 as it looks to add routes and bus times, examine bringing back fares and explore special services like a Redmond Airport shuttle.

“It looks to me like we have got the puzzle pieces in place,” said Barb Campbell, outgoing Bend City Councilor and chair of the Bend Metropolitan Planning Organization, a transportation planning board.

Potential for growth

Increased ridership in 2025 would continue transit’s trend rebounding from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Between fixed routes in Bend, recreational routes, intercity connections, on-demand rides and other services, nearly 660,000 people rode Cascades East Transit in 2024, up from the nearly 600,000 people who rode in 2019. Ridership hit a low point of 360,000 in 2020.

Meanwhile, while the transit service is still looking for more bus drivers, it has recovered from a driver and maintenance worker shortage that hamstrung the system for years.

But in Bend alone, ridership still hasn’t bounced back, with about three-quarters of the people riding fixed routes in the city in 2024 as compared to 2019. There are nine bus routes in the city — three fewer than before the pandemic. Expanding will be a main focus of Cascades East Transit in 2025.

Growing the system comes with a constant push and pull of assessing whether expanded routes will receive enough ridership to justify themselves, Townsend said. There still aren’t enough routes, he said, to know if new ones will be successful.

Potential areas for growth include northeast Bend and Deschutes River Woods, Townsend said. Adding an “express route” that skips stops would allow people to travel farther in less time.

Attracting new riders

Townsend said transit often follows the “if you build it they will come” philosophy. Townsend’s planned order of operations is to expand the range of service times, expand route locations and increase bus frequency. The first item would target commuters going to and from work, as the current schedule, with the final bus leaving Hawthorne Station at 5:15 p.m., doesn’t always fit people’s schedules, Townsend said.

For 42-year-old Coleman Younger, having a timely bus service is the difference between keeping his job and losing it. Younger, who lives in Bend and works at the BasX manufacturing plant in Redmond, takes the bus each afternoon from Hawthorne Station to the transit center in Redmond. From there it’s a 30-minute walk to work. He usually pays for an Uber or Lyft to shorten the journey. He has also used Cascade East Transit’s free Dial-a-Ride service, but said he sometimes can’t risk the ride being late. If he accumulates too many late punch-ins at work he loses his job, he said.

“It causes me stress throughout my day,” he said. “I’m uncertain whether I’m going to get there on time.”

Younger doesn’t have a car, so biking or bussing are the only options. But growing transit will require convincing people who do have a car to take the bus by choice, Townsend said. He cited the benefits of taking transit including cost savings, reduced congestion, safety and reduced carbon footprint.

In 2025 new mobility hubs — waypoints featuring bike parking, bike repair and kiosks in addition to a bus stop — could help promote transit.

“Right now we have so many people not riding,” he said. “That’s on us to make the service better that fits people, but it’s also on people in the community who want to see improvements in transportation to take a chance, ‘Hey let me see if this works.’”

That doesn’t have to mean scrapping car use altogether, but rather using the bus when it makes sense, Townsend said.

Transportation challenges mirror those from two decades ago

Transit changes in 2025 will come as Bend seeks to meet a 40% emissions reduction target by 2030 and complies with new state mandated Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities, rules intended to reduce car use in cities greater than 50,000 people.

Campbell said she is frustrated the rules are putting extra pressure on cities to cut car use before enhancing the transit system.

“We just don’t have excellent transit to give people that choice so they get out of their cars,” she said.

Several lobbying groups including the League of Oregon Cities and the Oregon Transit Association support expanding statewide transit funding as lawmakers mull an overhaul to transportation funding as a whole. The Legislature’s last transportation package in 2017 included a new payroll transit tax at 0.001%, or $1 of every $1,000 in wages, for services across the state.

Cascades East Transit, which does not have taxing authority of its own, relies heavily on the state tax, as well as grants. Bend hasn’t yet spent any of the $8 million earmark for transit services included in the 2020 transportation bond.

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