Winter Park’s bus transit system, The Lift, had a ridership of 522,800 people in 2019, but saw a 30% drop in ridership in 2020 because of COVID. Driver shortages in 2021 forced The Lift to decrease its capacity, and ridership dropped another 16%. Last year saw a rebound, though, with a 17% increase in ridership.Get more news about bus lift exporter,you can vist our website!

The 2022 ridership total of 358,402 sits well behind the pre-pandemic level of 2019, but Winter Park’s Interim Transit Manager Michael Koch said the 2022-2023 winter season has shown slow but steady improvement.

“The great news about this season, you know, we’re short-staffed, but we are staffed better than we were at any point last year,” Koch said. “We have been able to operate on all routes.”
In 2021, one of The Lift’s lines did not run at all, while others experienced cutbacks and interruptions. This season, Koch said, the system has maintained hourly service on every route, unless something unexpected happens, like a driver calling out sick or a bus breaking down.

Most routes operate on hourly schedules during the week and half-hourly schedules on weekends and holidays over the winter season.

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in January, The Lift limited its operations, running hourly buses on most routes to keep buses running between Winter Park Resort and the Cooper Creek Transit Center on a 15-minute schedule.

“We looked at where we were gonna have pinch points, and you know, where the largest crowds were going to be,” Koch said. “Understanding that the resort would likely park out pretty early, that was gonna send people into town.”
Extra buses running on the Cooper Creek Express route, or Lavender Line, helped The Lift avoid a backup of people at the transit station. Koch said the plan worked well, and The Lift did not receive any major complaints.

Other holidays during the winter season, like Christmas or New Year’s, draw large crowds of skiers as well, but Koch said The Lift can get more relief drivers from the system’s operator, First Transit, for those holidays than for MLK Day.

“First Transit, they have quite a few contracts with universities across the country, but those universities are closed over the (Christmas and New Year’s) holidays,” Koch said. “So they were able to provide us with a lot of relief drivers from those locations.”

The Granby Regional Commuter route, or Teal Line, operates on a less-than-hourly schedule on weekdays, weekends and holidays during the winter and is the only line with that sparse of a schedule.

Sofia Jimenez, a seasonal Winter Park worker who lives in Granby, takes the bus everyday. She moved to Granby from Costa Rica and said she takes the bus everyday, whether she needs to get to work or wants to go skiing.