Georgia Evans greeted the bus driver with jugs of milk and water in her hands and boarded the 11-seater OurWay shuttle, headed home from work in Ridgway to Montrose. She noticed it was a different bus driver from the usual one.
Evans would know. The 26-year-old single mom takes the bus every day to work at Mountain Market in Ridgway. She makes good money at the grocery store, and the service is the only reason she’s been able to keep her job since she lost her license about a year ago.
“I honestly don’t know what I would do without it,” she said of the bus service.
Evans said Mountain Market co-owner Valerie Hill helped her pay for her first punch pass for the service so she could keep the job.
Evans has calculated that the bus is more affordable for her than when she drove her car to work. It’s also pretty reliable, despite reduced service hours.
Since December, the OurWay route only runs once in the morning and once in the afternoon Monday through Friday, targeting commuters.
Six others headed to Montrose along with Evans last Friday afternoon, picked up at stops in Ouray and Ridgway. One mother who doesn’t drive was taking her two young sons to jiu-jitsu. One 20-year-old was returning home from her lifeguarding shift at the Ouray Hot Springs Pool, quietly hand-building a clay dragon during the ride. And there was another regular commuter, whom Evans often uses Google Translate to communicate with in Spanish on the ride when the bus driver asks if everyone is warm enough.
Ridership varies by day, but Evans is among at least a handful of regulars who, without OurWay, would otherwise have no way to get themselves to work in Ouray County. Yet the future of the twoyear- old service is unclear — project partners still need to discuss what happens once a three-year grant supporting the shuttle runs dry.
Creating OurWay
About four years ago, Ouray County, the town of Ridgway and the city of Ouray came together to design a transportation service aimed at shuttling workers from outside Ouray County to support businesses, government entities and the overall economy. The entities said the service was urgently needed to fill a workforce gap created by increased tourism and inflated housing prices and cited surveys of business owners and employees.
The three governments secured a $531,091 Colorado Department of Transportation grant to pilot a service for three years. The money was awarded by the Gunnison Valley Transportation Planning Region Committee, which is overseen by Region 10, a nonprofit organization supporting planning and economic development in Ouray County and five other counties in the region.
Ouray County’s three local governments equally contributed to a combined 25% match of $177,697 for the service, for a total project cost of $710,788. The group contracted with Montrose-based transportation nonprofit All Points Transit to run the service, dubbed OurWay, for three years.
The original grant estimated the service would cost $215,000 to operate in year one, $225,750 in year two and $237,038 in year three, increasing 5% each year to account for increased fuel and personnel costs. The grant also budgeted $30,000 for marketing and $93,000 for capital costs, including purchasing the 11-seater van, accessible by Americans with Disabilities Act standards. The grant anticipated $90,000 in revenue from fares over three years.
All Points Transit Executive Director Gary Clark said the local governments’ funding match was crucial in helping purchase the vehicle for the service, branded with “OurWay” in big letters.
Clark said transportation grants often support operations but don’t provide all the funding needed to purchase capital equipment.
It’s not clear how much money All Points received from fares. The Plaindealer submitted several requests for the agency’s actual operational costs and revenues since the service was launched, but All Points did not respond by the newspaper’s deadline.
Ridership and use
Since OurWay launched in March 2024, ridership has steadily increased, though All Points has significantly reduced the number of routes it runs. The service has changed its schedule three times since it launched.
During the first period of service, operators reduced the routes in response to safety issues with vans driving at night, Clark said. Within six months of running the service, the shuttle had collided with wildlife twice, resulting in expensive repairs. After that, All Points cut OurWay evening routes to reduce those types of accidents.
All Points also then shifted the Our-Way schedule from routes on Thursday through Monday to Monday through Friday. That change was to better align with the nonprofit’s other routes — none of the other services run over the weekends, Clark said. It also aligned better with the ridership they were seeing: commuters needed rides during the regular work week rather than over the weekends.
On Dec. 1 last year, All Points again cut back the OurWay schedule to two routes per day: the bus departs once from Montrose in the morning at 8 a.m. and once in the evening at 3 p.m.
Before this change, the route was running twice in the morning and three times in the evening.
Clark said All Points implemented the most recent change to save money because the bus service is tight on funding and because the route had little ridership in the middle of the day. Cutting back the number of routes also helps reduce wear and tear on the vehicle itself, Clark said. Ouray County’s three local governments own the vehicle.
All Points collects data on ridership numbers and makeup from drivers like Elizabeth O’Grady, who had been driving the OurWay route since it began and shifted to another job at AllPoints recently. Data from All Points shows annual ridership more than doubled from 1,819 in 2024 to 3,812 in 2025.
Since OurWay launched two years ago, the service has seen ridership increase overall, though the number of routes has decreased. The service has changed its schedule three times since it started, due to reasons including demand and safety concerns about collisions with wildlife.
Data source: All Points Transit, the nonprofit that runs OurWay.
Lia Salvatierra | Ouray County Plaindealer
Since All Points changed its schedule, however, monthly ridership is notably down. The only month last year where ridership was down from 2024 was in December, when the schedule changed. And ridership in January this year was only 112 riders, down from 427 in January of last year.
O’Grady agrees the shift in schedule has resulted in the loss of some regular riders, though she believes ridership will grow again as people adjust to the change. Some riders like Evans have had to work with their employers to adjust their work schedule in response to the OurWay service change.
Future of the service
It’s been a while since Ouray County’s local governments have met with All Points to discuss the service and what it could look like going forward, when the grant dries up.
Because the route is a pilot service, project partners are responsible for returning to CDOT at the end of the grant cycle and asking for continued funding for the project, according to Clark. It’s unclear what local governments will want to do, and how much they may have to pitch in again to keep the service up and running.
Clark said the bus will likely need replacing soon. There were around 160,000 miles on the vehicle after its first year of use, according to Clark.
Commissioner Jake Niece has said he wants to ensure the county is getting the bang for its buck with its current agreement with All Points. He also has said at multiple public meetings that he wants to increase how much the service runs and to better coordinate it with other regional transportation services. The service is one item slated for discussion at a work session with leaders from San Miguel and Montrose counties later this spring.
The Ridgway Town Council has also discussed working with CDOT and the county to create a regional transportation hub and purchasing property for that purpose, at its budget workshop last fall.
Michelle Haynes, executive director of Region 10, said transit routes like OurWay generally take a lot of time and money to get off the ground.
“One thing about transit is that it will take a long time to ramp up. People have to become aware of the routes,” Haynes said.
“That’s why public agencies will invest more up front, to give time for the demand to build,” she said.
When looking at operation costs outlined in the original grant compared to ridership numbers, the service potentially cost an average of $118 per ride in 2024 compared to $59 per ride in 2025 — without factoring in revenue from those rides.
Clark said revenue from fares was intended to be a supplement, not cover the cost of the service. The initial grant estimated about $90,000 in revenue over three years, growing from $25,000 in the first year to $35,000 by the third year, but it’s not clear whether these estimates turned out to be close to reality. The route costs $4 one way and $8 for a full day. Riders can also purchase a 20ride pass for $150.
Despite the reduced number of routes, Clark said he believes the service must be sustained to continue supporting the riders who need it to get to work in Ouray County.
He said occasional service interruptions, due to weather or wildlife-vehicle accidents, have demonstrated how much people rely on it. In those situations, All Points picked up stranded riders. Evans said O’Grady has even offered to drive another few blocks to pick her up from Mountain Market when it was too snowy to walk to the bus stop near Ace Hardware.
“We have people who do ride it and who do need it for their livelihood,” Clark said.
“It’s definitely a need, and I say that just because, even if it’s just for the one or two people who use it every single day to get to and from work, then it’s working,” he said.
Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.
