Parachute town staff want to fund a new transportation service next year, providing on-demand rides in the Colorado River corridor in Parachute, Battlement Mesa and Rifle.
Riders would be able to request a shuttle and carpool with other people.
Parachute would partner with Downtowner, Inc., which already operates in Aspen and Carbondale. Aspen has contracted with Downtowner, Inc., since 2016. The service expanded to Carbondale last summer, and the city of Glenwood Springs launched its own on-demand service in May.
The Parachute service would function like Uber or Lyft where community members can request rides with the Downtowner app. A dispatcher would then locate the rider with GPS to send the closest vehicle.
At Monday’s Garfield County meeting, Vinnie Tomasulo, Parachute’s community and economic development director, said that the infrastructure already exists in town for the project.
“The buses that we have, the fueling station … We would basically contract with the Downtowner to manage that,” he said. “But they would also expand with some on demand services that we currently don’t provide now.”
Tomasulo said the program would provide more accessibility to transportation for residents in western Garfield County, while lowering the number of single occupancy vehicles on the road.
“There’s definitely a need for on-demand,” he said. “Currently, in the town of Parachute, we really don’t have a lot of that, so we’re hoping that we can at least pilot it (for the) first year to be able to gather all that data that puts us in a position to tighten the service and have it be much more efficient than it currently is.”
Garfield County commissioners unanimously signed a letter of support Monday for the proposed service. The letter asks the Colorado Department of Transportation to help fund the service as early as 2026.
Garfield County already supports Parachute’s transit service with $250,000 in operating funding annually.
The town of Rifle has also been in conversations with Colorado Mountain College and the Grand River Health Hospital District about funding the expanded service. Both entities expressed strong support.
Fare rates have not been decided yet.
