MOVING ALONG: Valley bus service passes second anniversary

MEADOW LAKES — Those pink-striped buses shuttling commuters into Anchorage each day are now two years old.

“We have about 300 riders a day now,” Valley Mover Marketing Director Jennifer Tew said. “Some of our buses are standing-room-only some days of the week.”

The bulk of those riders, she said, are professionals heading to work in Anchorage. Second on the list would be university students. University of Alaska has a contract with Valley Mover to offer free rides to students with IDs.

Valley Mover, which celebrated its second birthday March 15, uses three buses to maintain a schedule of 10 daily routes. It has four buses in working order and a stable of less-than-operational spare buses. All are People Mover hand-me-downs.

Tew said Valley Mover has expanded at a pretty fast clip, but with that growth comes challenges. Right now, the biggest obstacle is a financial hurdle.

“We need to put in more service but we don’t have the funding,” she said.

Like most public transportation operations, Valley Mover runs on a mix of public and private money. Buses take in fares and sell monthly passes, but a lot of the money comes in the form of private and government grants and contracts like the one with UAA.

Tew said it’s hard to beat the deal she offers. Based on an average-sized sedan running from Wasilla to Valley Mover’s downtown terminus, Tew said she calculates the service saves daily commuters who buy monthly passes $9,000 per year. She’s trying to make that an even better deal.

“We are also going to try to lower our monthly rate this year. Right now it’s $120 and we’re going to try to go to $70,” Tew said.

Rider feedback is mostly positive, due in large part to those savings.

“They’re all grateful that they’re saving so much money. They get to relax on the drive, less wear and tear on their vehicles,” she said. “They make friends with each other because a lot of times you are riding the same bus, so you get to know the people, the bus people.”

A third of Valley Mover riders get off the pink buses and get onto one of the People Mover buses. Tew said she tried to set up a joint pass with the Anchorage system, but that didn’t work out. That $50 drop would take care of most of the cost of an Anchorage pass.

Other things she’s working on include a one-stop website and phone number and a transit center.

That hotline and website is an attempt to coordinate all of the various bus systems in the Valley. Tew used the example of a trip to a doctor’s appointment from Chickaloon to Anchorage. The rider could do it all with public transport, but would need to transfer from Chickaloon Public Transit to a MASCOT bus to a Valley Mover and then a People Mover. To get it all set up would require more than one phone call and probably quite a bit of surfing the Internet for schedules.

“We are going to submit that grant at the end of the week,” Tew said.

The transit center is just what it sounds like — a big, centralized spot where people can wait for their buses, maybe grab a coffee and leave their vehicles. The bus system has its eyes on a spot near Burger King in downtown Wasilla.

“Right now we’re using the Fred Meyer parking lot and Trunk Road, which is nice, but I think we might overgrow it sometime soon,” Tew said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.