Transit Brief · City of Asheville

The Bus Trilemma: the working detail

Every figure behind the paper, with its basis, its margin and what it cannot show. This is the page for anyone who wants to check the work.

Prepared 2026-08-23, updated 2026-09-26 · Figures from the National Transit Database (Time Series 2.1, npsm-38gk; Complete Monthly Ridership, 8bui-9xvu, which runs through June 2026), the City of Asheville's adopted budget books, its council documents of 24 March and 28 July 2026, and the signed operations contract released on 18 September 2026 · Peer band is rule-defined, not hand-picked

On August 18 the redesigned bus network was pulled from the city council's August 25 agenda, and the vote is now delayed indefinitely. The public argument is about money: a system that "costs three times as much to run as it did in 2018." That framing is measuring the wrong thing. On three of the four standard cost rulers, Asheville runs a cheaper bus system than most comparable American cities. What changed is not the price of the service. It is how many riders are on it.

1 · The problem, stated exactly

Four rulers exist for what a bus system costs. The council's argument, and the coverage of it, has been conducted almost entirely on the fourth one.

FY2024, fixed-route bus	Asheville	Peer median	Reading
Cost per rider	$7.92	$10.10	22% below
Cost per revenue hour	$123.28	$130.86	6% below
Cost per passenger mile	$2.16	$2.26	4% below
Cost per revenue vehicle mile	$9.96	$9.36	6% above
Riders per revenue hour	15.56	13.09	19% above median

The band is 145 agencies, chosen by rule rather than by hand: every US fixed-route bus system in an urbanized area of 150,000 to 500,000 people, carrying at least 150,000 trips a year. Thirty of them report no passenger miles, so that median is over the other 115. Two limits of that rule are worth stating, since the rule is the whole defense of the comparison. It counts agencies, not areas. Thirteen urbanized areas contribute more than one agency, and 28 of the 145 sit in them, so a town-scale operator can share a class with a city-scale one. Durham carries three. And ART runs only 19 vehicles in peak service, which would let it file a reduced NTD return. It files a full one anyway.

The one ruler where Asheville looks expensive divides by vehicle miles, and Asheville's buses are slow: 12.4 miles in a revenue hour against Roanoke's 16.3. Roanoke's buses cost within one cent of Asheville's per rider.

One caution about the year. FY2024 is the latest full annual release, and it is also a local high. ART carried 1,377,810 trips in FY2023 and 1,607,423 in FY2024, then 1,416,025 and 1,458,089 in the two years after. FY2024 sits 16.7 percent above FY2023 and 10.2 percent above FY2026. The peer comparison above is like-for-like, because every agency in the band is measured in the same year. But a cost per rider computed on a peak year flatters the agency, and the FY2026 productivity figures used later in this brief are the harder number. The direction survives the check: the same FY2024 cost over FY2026's lower ridership is $8.73 a rider, still 14 percent below the peer median.

2 · One cliff, then seven flat years

Riders per revenue hour is the cleanest measure of whether a bus is doing its job, and the federal database publishes the two numbers behind it every month. Asheville's own July-to-June fiscal years, every bar from the same file:

Riders per revenue hour, ART fixed-route bus, which is boardings per revenue hour: the federal count has no way to tell one rider making two boardings from two riders making one each. All nine years computed from the same monthly file and reconciling with the annual release to the digit. Peer median is FY2024.

The loss is one year wide. Between FY2019 and FY2020 ridership fell 28.8 percent while service grew 13.1 percent. That is the pandemic, and it happened to every transit system in the country. What is specific to Asheville is what came after. Since FY2021 riders are up 1.8 percent on 3.0 percent fewer hours. That is a slow improvement, and it is very small next to what was lost. FY2019 to FY2020 cost 570,197 trips. The gain since FY2021 is 25,900. Five years of recovery has clawed back under 5 percent of one bad year.

One year in that run needs naming. Helene falls in FY2025, and it shows: trips fell 11.9 percent from FY2024 and service fell 8.5 percent in the same year. FY2026 took both back up, trips by 3.0 percent and hours by 5.5 percent, which is why productivity kept drifting down while ridership recovered. The storm is a dip in this series. It is not the story of it.

So the honest version of the headline is not that the buses got expensive and not that they keep emptying. It is that Asheville bought a third more service around a collapse it did not cause, has never filled it, and has never published a target for filling it.

3 · The trilemma

Two lines of arithmetic govern every option anyone can propose:

Which leaves four things anyone can actually move: hours bought, price per hour, riders per hour, and who pays. Fares are not one of them. In FY2024 they were $601,698 against $12,732,832 of operating expense, 4.7 percent. Spread over 1,607,423 boardings that is 37 cents a ride actually collected. That is the number to reason from in either direction. A fare rise starts from 37 cents, not from the posted fare.

The price per hour is close to fixed. Asheville is already below its peer median there, and the operations contract with RATP Dev runs through the four base years, with the caveats in Step 5 about how the city can end it early. Those years are priced in the 24 March 2026 council packet at $12,671,301, $13,309,046, $14,102,049 and $14,817,546. The executed contract, released on 18 September 2026, has no clause that raises its prices automatically with inflation. It sets a monthly fee and a rate per revenue hour for each year, higher every year on a fixed schedule, and calls them firm fixed prices. Several of its clauses can still move them. The triggers include sustained inflation above the contractor's assumptions (§105.D(2)), a change of more than 10 percent in the hours run (§105.D(2) and §304.B(3)), and the city keeping 30-foot buses in service past 12 years or 600,000 miles (§103.A(6)). The city's September 2026 roster shows nine 30-foot buses in service past 12 years. So the 5.35 percent a year used here is still the compound rate across those four yearly totals, computed for this brief rather than quoted from the contract. Once the contract is paid, the FY2027 budget leaves $3,414,759 of the city's own cost. Hold that flat and total operating cost grows about 4.26 percent a year. So ridership has to rise 4.26 percent a year for cost per rider merely to stand still, about 13.3 percent from the first base year to the fourth. That is the bar before any improvement counts as improvement.

Coverage, service hours, and the current local contribution. Pick two. Every proposal anyone has made is one of these three rows, and only one of them has been put in front of council.

The one thing that moves the triangle instead of trading along it Cost per revenue hour. Asheville's is $123.28, already below the band median of $130.86. Among the 47 agencies in the band that contract their operations out it is the 16th cheapest, 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 matters more than it looks.

The second row has never been put in front of council, so here is what it is worth.

ART added 18,730 revenue hours between FY2019 and FY2026, which is 18.8 percent of what it runs now. What removing them would save depends entirely on which cost you charge them at, and taking the lower of the two rates below cuts the answer by more than half.

The signed contract, released on 18 September 2026, splits what the city pays RATP Dev in two (§105.B). A fixed monthly fee, $510,019.64 a month in the first year, covers the contractor's fixed costs. A rate per revenue hour, $63.60 in the first year, covers its variable costs. Each month's bill is the fee plus the revenue hours actually run times the rate, before deductions and incentives (§401.C). Fuel for the buses is in neither (§105.C(2)); the city buys it (Attachment A-2). NTD put ART's fuel and lubricants at $8.08 per revenue hour in FY2024.

Removing 18,730 hours, priced at…	Per revenue hour	Annual saving	Break-even rider loss
Fully allocated cost	$161.26	$3,020,379	18.8%
The contract's hourly rate, plus fuel	$71.68	$1,342,572	8.3%

The first row is the FY2027 adopted budget over FY2026 revenue hours. The contract's first-year price works out to about 103,000 revenue hours, more than the 99,753 run in FY2026, so measured from the hours its prices imply, getting back to FY2019's hours would mean cutting about 22,000, not 18,730. The second is the contract's first-year rate per revenue hour, $63.60, plus $8.08 an hour for fuel. That $8.08 is NTD's FY2024 fuel-and-lubricants cost per revenue hour, and it may count some lubricant the contract rate now covers. The second row holds only at the contract's first-year prices. Section 304.B(3) lets RATP Dev hold off on any service change of more than 10 percent in revenue hours until the two sides agree to raise the fee and the rate. A cut of 18.8 percent is past that line. Section 514.B lets the city reduce service on 30 days' notice with no price term, and the contract does not say which one a deliberate cut falls under. Treat the first row as an upper bound, and the second as the saving at unchanged prices, not a floor.

What it would cost in riders is the part nobody can answer:

If shrinking back to FY2019 hours costs…	Annual trips	Per rider, all costs cut	Per rider, contract rate and fuel cut
no riders at all	1,458,089	$8.96	$10.11
10 percent of them	1,312,280	$9.96	$11.24
18.8 percent, in proportion to the hours	1,184,313	$11.03	$12.45
26.3 percent, the share ridership fell FY2019 to FY2026	1,074,466	$12.16	$13.72
Today, for comparison	1,458,089	$11.03	$11.03

The break-evens are the whole finding, and they are far apart. Cut every dollar with the hours and shrinking beats today's cost per rider if the rider loss stays under 18.8 percent. It beats the redesign's own best case of $9.35 only under 4.2 percent. At the contract's hourly rate plus fuel the first bar falls to 8.3 percent and the second disappears: losing no riders at all still lands at $10.11, above the redesign's best case. Two honest cautions on top of that. The added service did not cause the lost ridership: the pandemic did, and nothing here shows the marginal hours carry nobody, only that in aggregate they never filled. And cutting hours without cutting destinations means worse frequency everywhere, so this is the coverage fight in a less honest form. What it really is, is the cheapest experiment available, and it needs the route-level data in Step 1 before anyone could run it responsibly.

4 · What the fight is actually over

The draft network removes service to seven destinations. Council's stated alternative is to add some of them back, at the cost of the fifteen-minute frequency the redesign is built to deliver. The $16 million gets spent either way. What stalled was the decision about how to arrange it, and here is the scale of the thing that stalled it:

Average daily riders, from the city's own 28 July 2026 council deck. The seven are the Outlets/Brevard Road/Transformation Village segment (40), West Haywood between Brevard and Patton (34), and the Grove Park Inn (30). Then MAHEC (11), the Social Security office (8), Kenilworth (7) and Beaverdam (2). The deck's Option 2 offers council four of the seven to add back: the Outlets segment, West Haywood, MAHEC and the Social Security office. The two smallest of those four are the Social Security office and MAHEC, at 8 riders a day and 11: a federal benefits office and a safety-net clinic, 19 riders between them. Kenilworth and Beaverdam are smaller still, at 7 and 2, but the deck does not offer them for add-back.

5 · What other cities got when they tried this

Asheville is not first. The relevant question is not whether a frequency-first redesign is a good idea in principle, but what happened to ridership in the cities that ran one.

City	What it did	Riders after
Knoxville	KAT Reimagined, launched 26 August 2024. The consultant cited an 18% gain here.	−4.1% on +22.8% service, first year after launch
Wilmington	Cost-neutral redesign, January 2025. Its plan protected coverage in writing, so the easier half of Asheville's trade.	−3.2% calendar; +2.8% fiscal
Winston-Salem	Approved unanimously, April 2026. Had already cut its three worst routes separately 15 months earlier, and bought microtransit as an explicit coverage substitute.	Too recent to measure
Roanoke	No redesign. Cited as cheaper per vehicle mile.	Costs within a cent of Asheville per rider

Four cities are not a law, and none of them is Asheville. Read the rows as evidence that the promised gain is not automatic, not as a forecast. Knoxville and Wilmington are computed from the monthly federal file, and the window is the thing to check. Knoxville is given on the twelve months either side of its 26 August 2024 launch, which is what isolates the redesign: 2,730,918 riders on 199,562 revenue hours before, 2,619,353 on 245,060 after. On Knoxville's own July-to-June fiscal years the same data gives −4.0% on +19.9% service, and a second year of −4.5%; a launch-aligned second year cannot be computed yet, because the monthly file ends in June 2026, two months short. Do not pair a launch-aligned ridership change with a fiscal-year service figure: they are different windows, and 4.1% belongs with 22.8%, not with 19.9%. Wilmington's two figures are the same data on two windows, and both are given because the choice of window changes the sign; Wave's own staff have told their board ridership rose 8.6 percent, in a January 2026 board packet read here. The federal file does not reproduce that on any window tested. The Knoxville launch date comes from a research pass rather than a primary document read here.

6 · What is actually available, cheapest first

There is no single solution. There is a sequence, and it is ordered by price, which puts the biggest number last because it is a decision rather than a purchase.

Step 0, what a target is worth. Against the FY2027 budget of $16,086,060 and FY2026's service:

Cost per rider implied by each productivity target, at the FY2027 adopted budget over FY2026 revenue hours. This is a budget divided by an actual, which is why today's figure reads $11.03 against the $7.92 actual for FY2024. Because the federal file is monthly, any target set here is checkable within about 90 days and any failure is visible inside a year. Knoxville's redesign was measurably failing in twelve months.

And the FY2027 budget is not a clean run rate. The city balances it with a one-time draw of $1,288,715 from fund balance, 8.0 percent of the transit fund. One-time is the budget book's own description, and it puts the draw down to increased expenses and decreased revenues. It is about twice what the first year of escalation costs, $637,745. One more line is worth watching. The parking fund transferred $951,892 to transit in FY2024 and nothing in FY2025, and the FY2027 budget counts on $950,000 from it again. Replacing money that may not recur is a different ask from paying for escalation, and only the second is priced here.

Step 2, the legal point that belongs with it.

One legal point belongs with it. Under 49 CFR 37.121, the obligation to run complementary paratransit attaches to operating a fixed route system at all. A companion rule, 49 CFR 37.131, sets the corridor at a minimum of three-quarters of a mile either side of every route, and adds a circle of the same radius at each end of it. Outside the built-up core a provider may draw it wider, up to a mile and a half. Inside the core, small pockets ringed by corridors stay covered even though no corridor reaches them. Asheville is not proposing to abolish fixed route, only to trim seven tails off it, so every surviving route keeps its paratransit corridor, and a van on a removed tail does not automatically stand in for it. Substitution is possible, but not by default: the city would have to put that service in its paratransit plan and certify that eligible riders can actually use it, that it runs as described, and that it will be coordinated.

That cuts both ways, and both belong in the decision. Cutting a tail shrinks the mandated corridor, though by less than it looks, because the end circle moves to the new end of the route rather than disappearing. It is a saving nobody has claimed and also a service reduction for a protected group, and it changes what Buncombe County carries, since the county files Asheville's ADA paratransit under its own agency. Against that, a van run as complementary paratransit takes on six sections of the regulation, 49 CFR 37.123 through 37.133, and they are not a short list. Beyond the service criteria below, they set an eligibility process with a written appeal, a twenty-one-day presumption if the provider does not decide in time, service to visitors from other places without a fresh certification, and door-to-door rather than stop-to-stop service. The entity has to schedule any eligible trip requested the previous day, at any requested time on that day. It may not require a rider to start a trip more than an hour before or after their desired departure time. It may not charge a rider more than twice the full fixed route fare for a trip of similar length at a similar time of day, and may not charge a personal care attendant at all. That cap does not bind an agency buying trips: the rule lets a provider charge a social service agency more than it may charge a rider, for trips guaranteed to that agency. It has to run the same hours and days as the fixed route. And it may not restrict or prioritize trips by purpose, cap the number of trips, or keep a waiting list. All three of those come back for standing bookings, which the rule calls subscription service and caps at half the trips available at any time of day. Nor may it fall into any operational pattern that significantly limits availability, a catch-all whose own examples are substantial numbers of significantly late pickups, of denied or missed trips, and of excessively long trips. Weather and traffic that nobody could have scheduled around do not count toward it. A plain cost per trip prices none of that. One caution the other way: the service criteria are not immovable. A provider carrying an undue financial burden can ask to be released from some of them. It is a request, not a decision: it runs through a public process first, the federal transit administrator rules on it case by case, and any relief granted runs for a set period.

Step 5, the fleet.

The fleet is worth a line here, because it is the one long-horizon cost that moves with this decision and because "the buses are old" gets said. Two comparable measures answer that differently. ART owned 35 buses in FY2024 and ran 19 of them in peak service, the same count the Title VI test above turns on. On average age the fleet sits in the middle: 7.51 years against a band median of 7.68. Of the 143 band agencies that report a bus fleet, 64 are younger. On the share of buses past their useful life benchmark it does not sit in the middle. That benchmark is the expected life of a bus, or the period it is acceptable to keep it in service. The transit agency either sets its own or takes the default FTA publishes, which for a bus is fourteen years. ART files three, at ten, twelve and fourteen years. Fourteen of the 35 had met or exceeded theirs, which is 40 percent of the fleet against a band median of 19 percent. And 113 of those 143 agencies carried a smaller share. Both readings hold because the ages are a barbell rather than a slope. Seven buses were a year old in FY2024 and fourteen were twelve years or older, so a recent order pulls the average down while the oldest group sits at the end of its life. The over-age count was five a year earlier; nine buses passed twelve years between the two filings. By September 2026 the city's own roster listed seven of the fourteen as out of service and seven new buses as in service. That left seven of the city's 30 buses in service past their benchmark. What matters for the option years is that any change of vehicle type, toward smaller buses on thin segments for instance, is a nine-year commitment if both option pairs are exercised and a five-year one if they are not. The full capital working is in section 9 →

7 · What is not a solution

• The redesign as a budget fix. The plan says so itself. The Draft Network Report tells readers: "Remember, this is cost-neutral, so if you want more service on your street, that must be paid for by cutting something else!" The alternative Growth Network, which uses 60 percent more resources, is labelled "not a proposal." So the redesign was never offered as a saving, and on the arithmetic it is not one: at the consultant's own +18 percent it cuts cost per rider 15.3 percent, and escalation takes all of that back in 4.0 years. Adopt it for reliability, transfers and job access if those are worth having.
• Replacing the network with vans. 126 out of 126, above.
• Fare-free, in either direction. Fare revenue was $601,698 in FY2024, the same dollars as in section 3: 4.7 percent of that year's actual cost, or 3.7 percent of the FY2027 adopted budget. Both are true and they are different ratios, which is this brief's own point turned on itself. And the money at stake is 37 cents a boarding, not the posted fare. Either way it is an access decision, not a cost decision.
• "Efficiency" without a denominator. The ruler the public argument is being conducted on is the only one of four where Asheville looks worse than its peers, and it looks worse mostly because the buses are slow.

8 · Three things nobody has established, and each decides the answer

9 · The capital side, in full

Step 5 above gives the fleet one paragraph, because the operating question is what that page is about. This section is the working behind The small print on the buses, which is the capital brief. Everything here is a federal or city record, and every derivation says which file it came from and what it assumes.

Updated 25 September 2026, revised 26 September 2026. Unless a passage says otherwise, the fleet figures below are from the city's 2024 federal filing. The city's own bus roster, released under a public records request on 24 September 2026, is newer. It lists 30 buses in service, and the five electric buses as out of service. Seven of the fourteen buses past their benchmark have left service and been marked surplus. Seven new buses went into service, three in November 2025 and four in September 2026. That leaves seven of the 30 past their benchmark. Nine are past the roster's own working life of twelve years. The city's replacement schedule lists five 35-foot hybrids due in January 2027. The capital brief carries the same update.

Buses past their own benchmark, year by year

Cumulative, of 35 owned. Each group is measured against its own reported ULB and the series assumes no retirements, no rebuilds and no replacements. It is arithmetic from the fleet record, not a city forecast. Nine buses crossed in 2024 alone and eight cross together in 2030, because the buses were bought in lumps rather than evenly.

The spare ratio, and its arithmetic

Reporting year	Peak	Available	Spare	Ratio
2018	17	22	5	29.4%
2019	17	27	10	58.8%
2020	19	29	10	52.6%
2021	19	31	12	63.2%
2022	19	31	12	63.2%
2023	19	33	14	73.7%
2024	19	35	16	84.2%

Ratio is spare divided by peak. FTA prints the 2022, 2023 and 2024 figures; the earlier four are the same arithmetic on the same two published counts. The series is not monotonic, so it must not be described as climbing every year: it falls between 2019 and 2020 and is flat between 2021 and 2022. Band comparison, same measure: median 45.6 percent, and 127 of the 145 sit below Asheville.

Who pays for a bus

Asheville does not buy buses on its own, and the dedicated federal bus program is the smallest part of it. This section moved here from the brief on 25 August 2026, because it is the answer to a question most readers will not ask and every transit-literate reader will.

When	What	Amount	Source
2018	Federal grant funds through the French Broad River MPO, to buy transit buses	$5,700,000	City release, 27 Aug 2019
2018	City match against that grant. The city called the two together a $7.1m budget for bus procurement, to be spent over three years	$1,400,000	same
Aug 2022	FTA Low and No Emission award: six hybrid replacement buses and three replacement batteries, to replace hybrids running since 2010	$4,200,000	City release, 16 Aug 2022
Feb 2024	Share of a $1.9m purchase of three clean diesel Gilligs still drawn from the 2018 grant, against $922,540 of city money	$974,066	Staff report, 27 Feb 2024
2026	Section 5339, Buses and Bus Facilities: the dedicated federal bus program, for the whole urbanized area, for the year	$371,372	FTA FY2026 apportionment

Council authorized seven buses in August 2019 and three more in December 2021. The December 2021 purchase drew on the 2018 MPO money together with Section 5339, with the twenty percent local share already programmed in the capital plan. Section 5339 is about 30 percent of what the city's own plan budgets for a single bus. Every large purchase in the last eight years came from somewhere else.

Capital expended, reporting year 2024	Amount
Federal	$663,910
City	$550,436
State	$0
Total, all of it on passenger vehicles	$1,214,346

None of it went to buildings, stations, fare equipment or expanding service. No cause is given here for the February 2024 split. The December 2021 purchase ran at the ordinary eighty/twenty and February 2024 ran at roughly half and half. The obvious reading is that the 2018 grant was nearly exhausted, and nothing on hand establishes it.

The five electric buses, the full record

In May 2019 the city announced that five all-new electric buses would go into service on ART routes on June 1. They are 2018 Proterra Catalyst buses, 35 feet long, and every other bus in the fleet is 29 or 30 feet. They were bought with federal Urbanized Area Formula money and the city owns them outright. Only the batteries are leased.

Reporting year	Miles on battery	Share of all bus miles	Miles per kWh
2022	163,344	12.9%	0.40
2023	151,386	11.4%	0.40
2024	42,210	3.2%	0.18

NTD Fuel and Energy, 8ehq-7his. Battery miles fell 72 percent in a single year and efficiency more than halved at the same time. The buses used 236,149 kilowatt hours to cover 42,210 miles, which is what the numbers look like when a vehicle is drawing power but barely moving.

The vehicle record makes the same point a second way. By the 2024 filing, the five had averaged 139,911 miles each since they were built. Two Gillig diesels bought a year later had averaged 266,810.