Free Wheeling Public Shuttle Service Uses School District Bus To Connect Three Rural Towns Three Times A Day

There’s no glitzy depot, but public transportation has come to northern Pend Oreille County.

A yellow 21-passenger school bus has been shuttling people among the almost equally small towns of Ione, Metaline and Metaline Falls since Labor Day weekend. The service is free.

“It makes it so handy for people who don’t have any transportation,” said Metaline resident Charlie Jarvis, 68.

Jarvis was on his way to lunch at the Kaniksu senior center in Metaline Falls.

“I try to make it every day if I can,” he said.

Jarvis was accompanied by a guest, Bonnie McFalls of Spokane. McFalls, 62, also had no car because she came to Metaline with her son, who was on a hunting trip.

“It’s pretty handy,” Jarvis said. “I went to Ione one day. I needed a haircut, so I went down there.”

Ione is 12 miles south of Metaline and 14 miles south of Metaline Falls.

The fledgling bus system’s three daily runs will continue at least two years under a $99,954 grant from the Washington Transportation Department. Supporters hope to get another grant or find other funding to make the service permanent.

Metaline Falls Mayor Lee McGowan, who has ridden to Ione to do her banking, hopes the shuttle will help pull the towns together.

“There’s always been kind of a separate feeling,” she said. “Now they can go to each other’s events and they don’t have to worry about the bad roads.”

Metaline Mayor Johnna Woodruff said the shuttle has helped families with children in the Head Start kindergarten she teaches in Metaline Falls. The bus stops across the street from the kindergarten, in front of McGowan’s Washington Hotel.

The stop is next door to Cathy’s Cafe, where Selkirk High School junior Sarah Duty is a parttime waitress. She rides the shuttle to work every day.

“It’s pretty nice,” she said. “That way you don’t have to call your parents to come get you.”

Her father, Frank Duty, is one of the shuttle drivers.

He said the school district quickly stamped out an unexpected problem when the shuttle defeated the school’s no-smoking policy. Students took the bus to Metaline for a smoke and rode it back in time for their next class.

But not anymore, Duty said. Students now must have a note from the principal to board.

Ironically, the person who got the shuttle service started hasn’t benefited much because she lives north of Metaline Falls, outside the service area.

Shelli Evans, a mother of four, took some technical writing courses as part of her Washington State University home-study program. She was inspired to write some grant applications for the school district and the three towns it serves, “and this one came through.”

The grant reimburses the school district for the use of its buses and drivers. Money also is available to buy a new bus, but a committee of mayors and school officials hasn’t decided yet whether to do that.

In its first eight weeks, ending Oct. 31, the bus averaged more than four riders on each regular run and 10 to 11 on special runs to high school football games, performances at the Cutter Theatre in Metaline Falls and other events.

The 128 regular Monday-through-Saturday runs in the first eight weeks carried 621 passengers, and only 7 percent of the runs were empty, Evans said.

If the pattern continues, officials probably will purchase a new 34-passenger school bus with a wheelchair lift, school district transportation supervisor Les Whittekiend said.

Buying a yellow school bus would improve efficiency by allowing the district to continue to use the public shuttle to also transport students. A bus with the mandatory schoolyellow paint could be used on regular school routes.

Also, high school students routinely ride the shuttle to the district’s two elementary schools, where they serve as teaching assistants. If the little bus isn’t big enough, the district substitutes a bigger one.

Whittekiend said the shuttle service also would benefit by sticking with school buses. The approximately $46,500 price of a 34-passenger school bus is about half the cost of a same-sized transit bus.

Such cost-sharing efficiencies probably would not be possible with a formal transit district, and the communities - among the most impoverished in the state - aren’t likely to support a transit tax, Whittekiend said. So he hopes to find some other way to make the new shuttle service permanent.

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