Green Mountain Transit May Cut Essex Bus Route No. 4

Green Mountain Transit could eliminate its No. 4 bus route serving Essex Junction and Essex Town as soon as next week, leaving fewer than 1,000 monthly riders without service on a corridor already thin on transit options.

The Burlington-based agency’s board of commissioners is scheduled to vote Tuesday on cutting the route. Eliminating it would save $112,000 a year and free up staff and equipment for higher-ridership lines, said Clayton Clark, Green Mountain Transit’s general manager.

The proposal arrives as the agency has already cut the equivalent of 20% of its bus service across Chittenden County since late 2024, reductions that saved $2 million annually. But the financial pressure hasn’t let up. Inflation continues to push operating costs higher, and the ongoing war in Iran is likely to drive fuel prices up further, Clark said. Pandemic-era federal relief funds that once kept the agency solvent are now largely spent, and no comparable replacement funding has materialized from the state or federal government.

Absent significant new revenue, Clark said, Green Mountain Transit faces a projected $2.5 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2028, which starts in July 2027. More cuts could follow, though nothing beyond the No. 4 route has been formally proposed.

The Essex route has long ranked among the agency’s least cost-effective. It costs roughly $28 to operate per passenger per trip, compared to an agency-wide average of $7. That gap makes it a target. But for the riders who depend on it, the math doesn’t capture everything.

Nate Bergeron, a shop steward for the agency’s driver union, told VTDigger that the cumulative effect of these decisions worries him deeply.

“All these things combined are going to lead to dramatic service reductions and cuts,” Bergeron said Wednesday, “which is going to make it even harder for people to get to the doctors’, and the pharmacies, and the dentist and the grocery stores.”

That concern mirrors what public health researchers have documented for years in rural and suburban communities across New England. When transit access declines, the people hit hardest tend to be older adults, people with disabilities, and low-income workers who don’t have a car or can’t afford to run one. Those are also the populations Green Mountain Transit increasingly serves through its on-demand services, which Clark said are in growing demand.

The agency hasn’t laid off any drivers during this period of cuts, Bergeron said, but it has shrunk through attrition. Layoffs remain a possibility, Clark said, if the financial situation continues to deteriorate.

For Upper Valley residents, this isn’t an abstract story about a Vermont agency across Lake Champlain. It’s a preview. Grafton County faces many of the same structural pressures: a dispersed rural population, limited Advance Transit coverage outside of Hanover and Lebanon, and growing numbers of older adults aging in place without reliable transportation. DHMC sees patients who travel from across the region, and not all of them have cars or family who can drive them. A missed bus connection can mean a missed appointment.

The American Public Transportation Association has tracked a national pattern of transit agencies drawing down federal COVID relief funds and then confronting structural deficits with no clear path to recovery. Green Mountain Transit is one of the more visible cases, but it’s far from the only one.

Clark didn’t close the door on the No. 4 route entirely. Whether the board votes to cut it Tuesday, or steps back to look for alternatives, the larger problem stays on the table either way.

Bergeron put it plainly. The drivers know their riders by name.

They know who needs to get to the pharmacy on Friday.