HENDERSONVILLE - Weekend service, more frequent stops and faster trips to Asheville Regional Airport and Blue Ridge Mall are some of the proposed improvements suggested for Apple Country Public Transit, as heard by City Council at its June 26 meeting.
Henderson County’s Transit Feasibility Study is nearing completion, and recommended changes to Apple Country’s bus routes are being shared with municipalities before the county Board of Commissioners votes on whether to adopt the improvements.
Commissioners chose steering committee members in February 2023 for the study, which looked at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the transit system, gathered input from the public about usage and needed improvements, and determined ways the system could be more effective and efficient.
Adding Saturday and Sunday service, offering more frequent stops, providing direct service to the airport and its connecting Asheville buses, longer hours of service and expanding the fleet while moving to gas-powered vehicles are among the recommendations included in the study’s eight-year plan.
Public input indicated that it’s very important to expand coverage and increase reliability, Henderson County Senior Planner Janna Bianculli told Hendersonville City Council members June 26.
For riders, the most important improvement was to provide Saturday and Sunday services. Apple Country Transit currently offers bus service on three routes throughout the county from 6:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Monday-Friday.
Planned improvement phases
The transit plan is broken into four two-year phases of improvements across all routes. Saturday service would be added in the first phase on Routes 1 and 2, the most used routes. An additional vehicle would begin taking riders to the mall with fewer stops in downtown Hendersonville for a faster trip.
Route 3’s weekday schedule would consist of a 90-minute loop instead of hourly service, a change that was recently implemented due to construction on I-26 and U.S. Route 25.
Also in this phase, a new “Route 4” would be offered to provide service on Sundays, also running a 20-minute loop in downtown Hendersonville on weekdays and Saturdays.
In phase 2, officials recommend changing Route 1 to running every hour on weekdays and Saturdays and hourly on Sundays. Route 2 would begin hourly service on Sundays, and the new Route 4 would begin running every 20 minutes on Sundays.
Meanwhile, Route 3 would become an express route to the airport and its connecting ART (Asheville Rides Transit) buses, running two one-hour loops during morning and afternoon peak hours on weekdays. This would be a fast trip to the airport, Bianculli said, as the bus could take I-26 instead of Asheville Highway and its frequent stops. Many residents take Apple Country’s buses to the airport to get on ART buses to Asheville, she added.
Phase 3 would include extending hours, with Route 1 running until 7:30 p.m. weekdays and weekends and offering half-hour service daily, and Routes 2 and 4 also extending until 7:30 p.m. weekdays and weekends.
In phase 4, the goal would be improved frequency, with Route 2 running every half hour on weekdays and hourly on weekends, and Route 4 running every 10 minutes on weekdays and weekends.
If all recommendations are implemented, seven buses will eventually be needed during peak hours. Apple Country has six buses for its three routes, and Bianculli said all six are needed due to the unreliability of the fleet, which runs on compressed natural gas.
“I would like to diversify the fleet so that it’s not just one singular fuel type,” Bianculli said, after Councilman Jeff Miller asked if they were looking to change the fuel source. “We had a bus recently get totaled and so that bus replacement will be gas, so that will be our first gas bus that we’ve had in probably 15, 20 years … so that will be a nice change to see if what we think is true is true, which is that they’re more reliable, it’s easier to get parts, easier to fix. The current CNG buses have to be fixed in an EPA-certified facility, and sometimes we have to send them to Greenville, South Carolina.”
She added that they’d like to have cleaner vehicles as well, and would probably start with hybrid additions instead of fully electric vehicles.
Apple Country Transit is run by WNCSource and is funded by local, state and federal dollars. The Federal Transit Administration under the U.S. Department of Transportation would fund the plan’s improvements since the service would be expanding, Bianculli said.
Buses have a useful life of five years, Bianculli said, and Apple Country sticks fairly close to that. The last set of buses ran for eight years, and although the current buses are set to be replaced after five years, they will be kept in service longer if they are still running well.
Councilwoman Melinda Lowrance said that if they could get more residents to use the system, it would cut the county’s carbon footprint. She asked how Apple Country would promote ridership to the younger generation and seniors.
One initiative in the works is to offer free ridership to BRCC students and staff starting July 1, Bianculli said. The new Route 4 is also a way to increase ridership, she added, by offering more frequent service.
“That’s what we’ve heard from folks. Nobody wants to ride a bus that only comes every hour, because that’s not very convenient,” she said. “People ride transit in bigger cities because it’s very convenient...because they’ll get picked up in 5 or 10 minutes, and it’s not difficult to plan that out…So one of the recommendations in the study is to go completely fare-free, so someone doesn't have to try to figure out the fare system, and another recommendation is increasing the frequency overall.”
Bianculli said the city could promote ridership by installing sidewalks, because transit shelters can only be put where there are sidewalks.
The routes
All of Apple Country’s routes have stops in Hendersonville and its ETJ, and city stops account for 70 of the 115 total stops in the county.
Route 1, which travels 14.8 miles and is mostly local to Hendersonville, is the most used and cheapest to operate due to having the most riders and a shorter route, Bianculli said. Route 2 covers 15.3 miles in the city, its ETJ and some of the county and performs pretty well in revenue per mile.
Route 3, at 27.6 miles, is the least used and has half the ridership of Route 1, the study found, and therefore has the highest operating expenses per passenger trip. “It doesn’t do super great, and a lot of recommendations came out of what to do with Route 3, because it’s our biggest issue,” Bianculli said.
Paratransit, or door-to-door transit via vans, is also offered for residents within a certain radius of the routes who physically or cognitively can’t use the bus system, which is federally required, she added. Most of these trips occur in Hendersonville, accounting for 64 percent of these types of rides, or 1,856 pickups in fiscal year 2023.
Ridership began dropping in 2017 and continued during COVID, but has recently started to increase, rising from 50,000 users in 2022 to 70,000 in 2023.
“We are seeing a good tick up, and I think we will continue to see that when we have our final 2024 numbers,” Bianculli said.
Highlights from the Transit Feasibility Study executive summary released in February 2024:
One transportation-disadvantaged group that exists in higher proportion within Henderson County is senior-aged citizens who may have a stronger dependency on transit services. High concentrations of the elderly population live around Route 1, along the I-26 corridor in eastern Henderson County, and in the towns of Fletcher and Flat Rock.
Other transportation-disadvantaged groups such as minorities, impoverished individuals and households without vehicles are not found at a high rate in Henderson County above the state average. However, the densest populations of the latter two can be found along the I-26 corridor, and the former in Southeast Hendersonville, demonstrating the importance of reliable transit service in these areas.
The densest cores for employment in Henderson County are in proximity to the major thoroughfares of I-26 and U.S. 64. Henderson County brings a near equal number of workers into the county - 19,473 - as residents who stay in the county to work - 19,957. The plurality of these workers commuting into Hendersonville travel from neighboring Buncombe County.
One of the more integral plans for the area’s development is the county’s 2045 Comprehensive Plan. The feasibility study seeks to facilitate goals identified in the plan such as promotion of healthy living, public safety and access to education.
Expanding service to outlying places was identified as a transportation need by different stakeholders through public engagement.
More information about the plan can be found at hendersoncounty2045.com/transit-study or at hendersonville-nc.municodemeetings.com in the June 26 City Council meeting agenda. The council meeting can be viewed at youtube.com/channel/UCT4upsJqDADQjBsBBUd19TA/live.
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