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Where’s the new St. George-Zion bus? A driver shortage has slowed its roll

A bus picks up passengers in Zion National Park, Sept. 22, 2023. The launch of a new route to connect the park with St. George is running behind schedule because of challenges in hiring enough drivers.
David Condos
/
KUER
A bus picks up passengers in Zion National Park, Sept. 22, 2023. The launch of a new route to connect the park with St. George is running behind schedule because of challenges in hiring enough drivers.

The route is set.

The buses have arrived.

But as of early October, a new public transit line connecting Zion National Park with St. George is running behind its planned July start date.

The hold-up has been hiring enough drivers, said St. George Public Works Director Cameron Cutler. Since this summer, the city has raised salaries by roughly one-third in an attempt to attract more applicants.

“It's not necessarily a big surprise. It's just a little bit more of a disappointment,” Cutler said. “The increased wage has helped significantly so we’re pleased with that, even though we haven't got all the drivers yet.”

The city has hired five drivers and is in the process of hiring a sixth, he said, which would be the bare minimum to reliably start the service. The new hires will still need a couple of weeks to train and learn the route, so Cutler now hopes the line will welcome its first passengers by the end of October.

Six drivers could handle the Monday-Friday routes, and the city may temporarily pull drivers from its existing SunTran transit service to cover Saturday. Ideally, though, the new route should have eight or nine drivers to allow some buffer for people calling in sick or taking time off.

“We're going to continue to hire drivers until we hit the number that we need,” Cutler said.

He understands the delay may be frustrating for people who have looked forward to hopping on board, but the city doesn’t want to start the service before it’s ready.

“When we start it, we want to be consistent, and we want to be reliable in the coming years. We look at it from a long-term perspective.”

The bus between southwest Utah’s largest city and most popular national park has been years in the making.

The service will feature five, 37-seat diesel buses and be overseen by the city of St. George. It’s funded by a $15 million grant from the Utah Department of Transportation and a portion of a Washington County sales tax for transportation.

Despite the delay, the details of the service haven’t changed.

The plan is to offer $5 one-way fares, along with a $100 monthly pass option for unlimited rides. The 42-mile route will start in St. George, with stops in Washington, Hurricane, La Verkin and Virgin before reaching its endpoint in Springdale. Because service is planned to run from 6 a.m. to 8:50 p.m., each bus will require at least two drivers per day.

The struggle to hire drivers points to a larger trend in gateway communities around tourist hotspots in the West.

High housing costs in places like Moab and Park City have made it hard for those cities to hire enough police. Mountain communities in Colorado have struggled to hire restaurant staff even after increasing wages. Hospitality workers in towns like Springdale, at the gates of Zion, sometimes can’t afford to live where they work.

The rising cost of living means it’s increasingly difficult to hire all kinds of workers, said University of Utah Professor Danya Rumore, who works at both the College of Architecture and Planning and the S.J Quinney College of Law.

“When your wages for the things that keep your community running cannot keep up with the cost of living, you lose services that keep your community working and really keep it a vibrant place.”

She worked with local leaders in the Zion area in 2016 to set up a regional collaboration to address the ramifications of large crowds in nearby communities. The park’s visitation — more than 4.6 million in 2023 — has doubled in the past two decades.

Transportation has long been a key issue, she said, which makes this latest setback all the more frustrating.

“It's kind of ironic — in the worst of ways — that the issues they have been trying to solve are in some ways getting in the way of making the transportation solutions happen.”

Rumore also co-directs the Gateway & Natural Amenity Region Initiative, a collaboration with Utah State University that studies how communities might overcome similar challenges. The initiative’s 2022 survey of public officials across the West found that around two-thirds said it was difficult to hire and retain local government employees. It also found that housing affordability was the top economic issue on officials’ minds, with nearly 90% saying it was a challenge in their community.

A lot of wealth has been moving into these towns, she said, especially since the start of the COVID pandemic. That drives up prices and often puts housing out of reach for residents — and people who might want to move there to take a new job.

“These places are often really attractive because they have such a good quality of life,” Rumore said. “When you can't keep people in these roles, all of that is very at-risk and often gets quite eroded.”

There’s no silver bullet, she said, but some positive steps might be to change the rules around zoning and short-term rentals to make housing more affordable. It’s also vital to get community members on the same page about their vision for the town’s future and then tell state leaders how they can help the town achieve it.

David Condos is KUER’s southern Utah reporter based in St. George.
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