Yes, but not one solution: a sequence, and the first two steps are free.
There is no option that keeps the current coverage, the current quantity of service, and the current local contribution. One has to give. What there is, and what nobody has put in front of the council, is a way to find out which one should give before spending anything to find out.
Where the evidence points somewhere this page says so, and where it does not it says that too. Every figure has a basis, a margin and a limit, and all three sit on the working detail, which is meant to be checked rather than read.
01The diagnosis has to be right first
ART is not expensive. It is unproductive. Those point at opposite remedies.
| Asheville | Peer median | Reading | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per rider | $7.92 | $10.10 | below median |
| Cost per revenue hour | $123.28 | $130.86 | below median |
| Cost per passenger mile | $2.16 | $2.26 | below median |
| Cost per revenue vehicle mile | $9.96 | $9.36 | 6% above |
| Riders per revenue hour | 15.56 | 13.09 | above median |
Four of the five put Asheville on the right side of its peer group. So "the buses cost too much" is not what the federal data says. What it says is this:
| FY2019 | FY2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue hours | 81,023 | 99,753 | +23.1% |
| Passenger trips | 1,978,720 | 1,458,089 | −26.3% |
| Trips per revenue hour | 24.42 | 14.62 | −40.1% |
Asheville is running 23% more bus service than in 2019 and carrying 26% fewer people on it. That is the failure, stated exactly. It is not a price problem, and the remedies for a price problem will make it worse. Why FY2024 is a local high, and the two limits of this peer band →
02The arithmetic that governs every option
Four things anyone can move, and a constraint nobody has said out loud
cost per rider = (cost per revenue hour) ÷ (riders per revenue hour)
Everything anyone can propose moves one of four terms: hours bought, price per hour, riders per hour, and who pays. The fare is not a fifth. In FY2024 it covered 4.7% of what the buses cost, and 37 cents is what is actually collected a boarding.
The 24 March council packet prices the four base years at $12,671,301, $13,309,046, $14,102,049 and $14,817,546. It states no escalation clause and no index, so the 5.35% a year below is the compound rate across those four figures, computed here rather than quoted. Holding city-side costs flat, total operating cost grows 4.62% a year. Which means: ridership has to rise 4.62% a year just to hold cost per rider still: +14.5% over the three years from contract year 1 to year 4, before any improvement counts as improvement.
03The trilemma
Coverage, hours, budget. Pick two.
Every proposal anyone has made is one of these three rows. Only one of them has been put in front of the council.
You need new revenue. Cost rises 4.62% a year whatever the council decides about MAHEC. This is the sales-tax conversation.
Frequency falls everywhere. Fewer hours across the same map. Nobody has proposed this: it is Option D, and it saves between $1.65m and $3.02m a year.
Coverage falls. Same hours, fewer places. This is the redesign, and it is the only one of the three the council has been shown.
Cost per revenue hour. Asheville's is $123.28, already below the peer median of $130.86, and 16th cheapest of the 47 in the band that contract their operations out, against a contracted median of $140.98. There is no easy saving there, and the base contract runs through FY2030. Which is why Step 5 of the sequence matters more than it looks.
04Every option, priced
The FY2027 budget is $16,086,060 and buys 1,458,089 rides
| Option | Cost | Per rider | Evidence it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Status quo | $16,086,060 | $11.03 | Grows 4.62% a year to about $22.1m by the final option year |
| B. Redesign delivers the consultant's +18% | same | $9.35 | No comparison city achieved this cost-neutrally |
| B2. Redesign delivers +22.4%, the size of Knoxville's FY2024 rebound | same | $9.01 | Knoxville's first year after its August 2024 launch was −4.1% |
| C. Redesign delivers what Wilmington and Knoxville delivered | same | $11.50 | Wilmington −3.2%, Knoxville −4.1% |
| D. Shrink service back to FY2019 hours | saves $1.65m–$3.02m | $8.96–$9.90 | Untested. Nobody has proposed it |
| E. Fare-free | +$601,698 | n/a | FY2024 fares; 3.7% of the FY2027 budget. Not a cost measure either way |
| F. Vans for the two smallest add-backs | $53,270–$168,393 | n/a | 0.33%–1.05% of the budget |
| G. Quarter-cent county sales tax | new revenue | n/a | Needs a referendum; splits per capita, county share on its out-of-town population only; must supplement not replace transit funding; lost in New Hanover |
| H. Dedicated city property-tax slice | new revenue | n/a | Winston-Salem raised 2.50¢ for $7,007,910, no referendum |
D is the arithmetic outlier, and it is not on the menu
Removing the 18,730 revenue hours added since FY2019 saves $3,020,379 a year if every dollar falls with the hours. It does not. NTD's own function split puts vehicle operations and maintenance at $6,957,288 of $12,732,832, 54.6%, which puts the saving at $1,650,352. Both columns are shown because the gap between them is the argument:
| If shrinking back costs… | Trips | All costs cut | Running costs only |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% of riders | 1,458,089 | $8.96 | $9.90 |
| 10% | 1,312,280 | $9.96 | $11.00 |
| 18.8%, proportional to the hours | 1,184,313 | $11.03 | $12.19 |
| 26.3%, the share ridership fell since FY2019 | 1,074,466 | $12.16 | $13.44 |
The two break-evens are far apart, and the difference is which costs actually fall. Cut every dollar with the hours and shrinking beats today's $11.03 below a 18.8% rider loss, and the redesign's best case of $9.35 below 4.2%. Cut only the running costs and the first bar drops to 10.3% and the second disappears: no rider loss at all still lands at $9.90. The function split and both break-evens →
The 23% more service did not cause the 26% fewer riders. The pandemic did the ridership damage. Nothing establishes that the marginal hours carry no one, only that in aggregate they have not filled.
And shrinking is the coverage debate in a less honest form. Cutting hours without cutting destinations means worse frequency everywhere; cutting destinations is the redesign. There is no version of D that does not take something from somebody.
What D really is, is the cheapest experiment available. Remove the lowest-productivity hours in one pilot, publish trips per revenue hour monthly, and within two quarters you know whether those hours were carrying anyone.
F is cheap enough to end the deadlock outright
The council deadlocked over seven destinations carrying 132 riders a day between them, 3.1% of the system. The deck offers four of the seven back to council, and the two smallest of those four, the Social Security office at 8 a day and MAHEC at 11, can be bought outright:
| How | A year | Share of the budget |
|---|---|---|
| Wilson-style shared microtransit, $11.17 a ride | $53,270 | 0.33% |
| Mountain Mobility, net of what it already recovers | $127,475 | 0.79% |
| Mountain Mobility at its gross cost per trip | $168,393 | 1.05% |
The thing that stalled the decision costs between fifty and a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year to remove. The $16 million is spent either way; what stalled was how to arrange it. This does not solve the cost problem, and nothing here does on its own, but it unblocks the vote. The 40-rider Outlets / Brevard Road / Transformation Village segment is different: cheaper on the bus under every assumption tested, and Kenilworth and Beaverdam are smaller still but are not on the add-back menu.
05The sequence
Cheapest first, and the biggest number is last because it is a decision, not a purchase
STEP 0
Attach a number to the money
There is no published ridership target for ART. No productivity target, no cost target. Increasing the budget of a system with no stated goal is an accounting decision, not a transit one. The metric to set already exists, is federal, is free, and is published monthly: trips per revenue hour. Any target is checkable within about 90 days.
$0A council resolution and a monthly page on the city website
STEP 1
Get the two documents that would settle the coverage fight
ART's Title VI Program: a federal triennial requirement, so it almost certainly exists unposted. Ask, but expect less than the argument needs. FTA Circular 4702.1B attaches the rider survey to providers running 50 or more fixed route vehicles in peak service AND sitting in an urbanized area of 200,000 or more. Asheville's urbanized area clears the second at 285,776; ART's 19 vehicles do not clear the first, so the requirement does not reach it. The Director of Civil Rights may place a smaller provider in the same category, and nothing suggests that has happened here. That is the likeliest reason no weighted rider survey exists; the only rider data in public is a 1,359-person opt-in sample. And the route-level productivity data, which sits in the city's Choices Report as images with no text layer. Boardings per hour by route is exactly the input Option D needs and the redesign argument lacks.
$0Two records requests
STEP 2
Buy out the two smallest add-backs and take the vote
The deadlock is not about money. It is about 19 riders a day at the two smallest destinations council was offered back, and they are affordable at any of the three prices above. Adopt the redesign for what it actually does (reliability, transfers, job access) with the coverage objection bought out rather than argued down.
$53k–$168k/yr0.33% to 1.05% of the transit budget
STEP 3
Apply to MEE-NC before spending local money on vans
NCDOT has run a statewide microtransit programme since late 2022 on a US DOT SMART grant, with a published implementation guide and eleven participating communities. Asheville, Buncombe County, Mountain Mobility and Land-of-Sky appear nowhere in its case study. McDowell County is in it. So is Wilmington's Wave Transit. Whether Asheville ever applied is a phone call.
Grant moneyPossibly nothing; possibly already closed
STEP 4
The Winston-Salem route before any referendum
Winston-Salem raised a dedicated transit property-tax slice 2.50 cents in FY2024–25 ($7,007,910) with no referendum and no act of the legislature. The county quarter-cent is the harder road. A quarter-cent county tax under Article 43 needs a referendum, and a yes vote lets the commissioners levy rather than obliging them to. The proceeds split per capita among the governments in the county that operate or contract for transit, but the county's own share counts only its population outside any town, so it is not the county-wide figure a reader reaches for. And the money must supplement existing transit funding rather than replace it, which constrains what the new revenue may be spent on and does not freeze the city's $8.4 million transfer. It is what New Hanover County tried and lost 47.1% to 52.9% in 2022.
A council voteWhether Asheville's structure permits it is a question for city finance
STEP 5
Decide the contract option years, now, not in 2030
The base contract is $54,899,942 through year 4. Four option years worth $65,417,313 are undecided, taking the all-in total to $120,317,255 and the final year to $17,440,670. Declining them returns the city to procurement in year 5 rather than year 9. It is the biggest number on this page and the council has not been asked about it.
$65,417,313The decision window is open now
06What is not a solution
Four things that will be proposed anyway
- Replacing the network with vans. Of 126 peer agencies running both fixed route and demand response, the van costs more per trip than that agency's own bus in every single one. Los Angeles Metro's own board report puts Metro Micro at $42 a ride in September 2023 against a $20–25 target, and records operational changes cutting it to $29.06 by the second quarter of FY2024. Sacramento cancelled SmaRT Ride at over $47 a passenger and narrowed the replacement to seniors, disabled and low-income riders to control cost. Wilson's $11.17 is the best general-public van cost in North Carolina and it is 41% more per rider than Asheville's buses already cost, and Wilson files as a rural reporter, outside the band used everywhere else here. The closest comparison is in the same county: Buncombe's Mountain Mobility at $35.31 a trip against ART's $7.92, same year, same reporting standard.
- The redesign as fiscal repair. The plan says so itself: the Draft Network Report tells readers “this is cost-neutral, so if you want more service on your street, that must be paid for by cutting something else,” and labels the 60%-larger Growth Network “not a proposal.” The arithmetic agrees: at the consultant's own +18% it cuts cost per rider 15.3%, and escalation takes all of it back in 3.7 years. Adopt it for reliability and job access.
- Fare-free as a cost measure. FY2024 fares were $601,698: 4.7% of that year's cost, or 3.7% of the FY2027 budget. Both are true and they are different ratios. It is an access decision, not a cost decision, in either direction.
- "Efficiency" without a denominator. Cost per revenue vehicle mile, the ruler this argument is being conducted on, is the one metric of five where Asheville looks worse, and it looks worse mostly because its buses are slow: 12.38 mph against Roanoke's 16.29. Roanoke's buses cost within one cent of Asheville's per rider.
07Three things nobody has established
And each of them decides the answer
- Whether the hours added in 2020 are carrying anyone. Route-level boardings per revenue hour would settle it, and the city has the data.
- What Asheville's riders actually need. There is no weighted survey, and as Step 1 says, ART is not required to run one. Whatever the Title VI Program holds is the closest thing that exists, and it may hold nothing about riders at all. Filling this gap probably means commissioning a survey rather than requesting a document.
- Whether a cost-neutral redesign can raise ridership at all. The two cases checked here both went the other way: Knoxville lost 4.1% in the twelve months after its August 2024 launch, on 22.8% more service, and Wilmington lost 3.2% across calendar years after a redesign that protected coverage in writing. Two cities are not a law and neither is Asheville, but it is the evidence there is, and it argues for adopting the redesign on its reliability and access merits with the ridership case treated as a hope rather than a plan. Both Wilmington windows, and what Wave’s own staff claim →
Eighteen trips per revenue hour is reachable two ways, and they are the same target: carry 23% more people on today's service, or carry today's people on 18.8% less. Today's riders on FY2019 hours is exactly 18.00 an hour.
They do not cost the same. Growing to 18 lands at $8.96 a rider and assumes nothing about which costs are fixed. Shrinking to 18 lands at $8.96 only if every dollar falls with the hours, and at $9.90 if only the running costs do. Nobody has established which. And Asheville has published no target on either side of it.