Ridership up on Valparaiso buses

The V-Line bus hit 7,000 riders in October and the ChicaGo Dash had 28 riders at the beginning of the week.

The V-Line has seen steady growth since it started a year ago. Ryan Landers, general manager, said he hopes to see it keeps growing.

"It might be far-fetched, but we would like to reach 10,000 riders a month," he said.

In May, before the route serving Valparaiso University students was stopped for the summer months, overall ridership was at just less than 4,000 in May. It promptly started increasing again once the university route started back up and had 6,500 riders in September, Landers said.

The university route is popular because students get to ride for free, but the other routes are increasing too, Landers said.

The next goal is to start focusing on advertising. Landers said the department doesn't have much money but that he does plan on going around to businesses and asking them to hand out pamphlets to their customers.

"They might as well ride it, especially the way the economy's going," he said.

Landers said that because the goal of the bus is to provide transportation to people who need it, it doesn't necessarily need to have a certain number of riders a month to make it viable.

That doesn't hold as true for the city's new commuter service to downtown Chicago, the ChicaGo Dash.

The service, which has been running for a month, needs to average about 40 riders a day to make it viable, Stu Summers, executive director for the Redevelopment Commission, said.

It's still shy of that goal by about 10 people, but it has grown since it started. The first week averaged about 18 to 20 riders a day.

"It's building, but it's going slow," Summers said.

The city is already adding a new route, though, on Saturdays for people who want to shop or visit the museums. Summers said the city decided to try the new route out for a month, starting Saturday, Nov. 15, after several people asked for it.

If that route proves popular, he said, it will continue.