OSTG 2023 Applications

The 2022 service year was the first year of operation for the Basalt Connect service. We do not have comparative data from previous years to be able to provide the requested analysis. When looking through the 2022 service year, the ridership trended upward throughout the year as the service became better known to the community. It's likely that ridership would stabilize and be strong if we had more regular, year-round hours, which we are working toward in the future.

To estimate ridership, we looked back at our summer numbers from 2022 and we saw a significant jump from June to July which could be explained with the fact that we were in the off-season the prior month (May) and people had to get reacquainted with the service. In addition, June ramps up to “summer season” with the first half lagging in tourism a bit. The difference between July and August is a bit more tempered with about a 15% increase in ridership between months.

The service we are adding is during the middle of the day so I don’t suspect a large jump in ridership but I do think the consistency throughout the day will help. We think that a 15 – 20% increase is a good conservative estimate of month over month increase in ridership.