Valley Mover has plenty left in the tank

WASILLA — Residents of a bustling, growing Mat-Su Borough have places to go, work to accomplish and people to see. And more and more of them are using mass transit to get from Point A to Point B.

April marks the three-year anniversary of Valley Mover, and what started as a single pink bus transporting commuters to and from Anchorage has grown into a small fleet of five buses making 14 round-trips a day between the Valley and Anchorage.

“It’s definitely coming along,” said Moki Tew, a longtime local businessman who started Valley Mover. “We have over 400 rides a day now, five buses running and we’re now putting on a sixth bus. We have those 14 trips a day. Being a commuter bus, in the morning the buses come here from Anchorage empty and leave from here full. It’s getting bigger and bigger every month.”

A stable, reliable bus service between the Mat-Su and Anchorage was a need for a long time before Valley Mover started running in April 2010. Valley Mover is a nonprofit organization governed by a board of directors.

Just how successful it could be with rising fuel costs had some skeptical of the endeavor, even the Frontiersman. In a February 2010 editorial, the newspaper praised Tew and supported his idea, but also wondered if the community would embrace giving up the convenience of their own vehicles for the economy of taking a bus.

“While we support this effort, there’s ample room to suspect it is doomed to fail,” the editorial opined. “This is a car/pickup kind of place filled with people who don’t like to wait for a ride somewhere.”

What Tew knew, and the Frontiersman apparently didn’t consider, is that while people enjoy their own vehicles, they like saving money even more.

And if you’re a daily commuter between home in the Valley and Anchorage, using Valley Mover to connect to Anchorage’s mass transit system is a huge savings, Tew said.

“It saves a rider about $10,000 a year riding the bus,” Tew said. “I knew I could do this and I knew I could help and I knew this would be a big help to everybody.”

Using data from AAA, Tew said he calculated an average vehicle would burn about $10,000 in gas driving daily to and from Anchorage five days a week. Subtract the $120 a month it costs for an unlimited Valley Mover pass, and the savings is still more than $8,500.

More importantly, Tew said, that savings is likely staying at home, circulating in the local economy.

“This helps our economic development in the borough, and that’s because the folks who do take the bus get to keep another 10 grand in their pockets,” he said. “Studies all over the world say if you drive into the city, you do all your shopping before you come home. But if you take transit, you do your shopping when you get home. So, they spend most of what they’re saving in the Valley, and that’s kind of nice. That’s millions of dollars a year we’re leaving right here in the Valley.”

Long before Valley Mover, local residents came to know Tew as owner of Tew’s Automotive and as a contractor with the borough for wintertime snow removal. His distinctive pink color, from all his buildings to vehicles and including Valley Mover buses, has become a trademark.

“That was my wife’s idea, it was Roberta’s idea,” Tew said of the pink. “We were painting things blue one day and she didn’t like the color, so she said she liked pink instead.”

Going on three years and Valley Mover is in the pink literally and figuratively, Tew said. In 2011, the company entered into an agreement with Matanuska-Susitna Community Transit (MASCOT) that expands the footprint of mass transit in the Valley. MASCOT gave up its limited service to and from Anchorage and instead added drop-offs and service to Valley Mover. That allows Valley Mover to focus on the commuter side of transit while MASCOT can focus on moving people locally in the borough’s core area.

Running six buses and more than a dozen round-trips a day is nice, Tew said, but is only scratching the service of the potential for a more integrated system between the Valley and the rest of Southcentral Alaska.

He said he’s attempting to acquire the old Kenai Supply building located near the intersection of the Palmer-Wasilla and Parks highways as a terminal hub that will run dozens of buses and someday maybe even light rail.

Although Valley Mover is about to expand to six buses running daily, Tew said he has 17 buses. And with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 daily commuters in the area, he sees plenty of room for growth.

“Eventually, what’s going to happen is once we start getting 100 buses going up and down the road, eventually then we’ll be able to get light rail in here and the rail station goes right there into Kenai Supply,” he said. “It’s definitely a plan that can keep growing and it won’t die.”

Contact reporter Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.

For more information about Valley Mover or its routes and schedules, visit valleymover.com.