Tag Archives: Grand Canyon

Bus Photo of the Month: July 2024

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New Flyer C40LF C-27

Location: Grand Canyon Visitors Center, Grand Canyon Village, Arizona
Operator of Vehicle: Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C.
Date of Photo: August 20, 2019

If I were to ask you what entity in the United States operated nearly 800 transit vehicles carrying over 26.6 million passengers during 2022, would you think of the National Park Service?  The National Park Service operates transit services for a variety of reasons at many of its facilities across the country, such as to provide mobility to or within a park or for interpretive tours.  These services are provided through a combination of concession contracts, service contracts, or cooperative agreements.

The South Rim Shuttle Service at the Grand Canyon provides transportation to and within one of the most visited NPS units in the entire country.  The fleet of about 30 CNG powered buses is owned by the National Park Service and the actual operation is managed and run by Boston based Paul Revere Transportation, L.L.C. under a contract that currently runs through November 2030.  The South Rim Shuttle Service has been in operation since 1974 and prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, approximately 7.5 million people used the shuttle buses each year.  In 2022, there were over 4.4 million boardings, making it the third busiest “transit system” in the National Park Service’s portfolio.  The NPS transit services carried nearly 46 million passengers in 2019 prior to the pandemic, so like many other transit systems in the United States and around the world, ridership is still recovering from the impact of Covid.  

Have you been on any of the 80-plus transit systems within the National Park Service’s inventory?  If you aren’t sure, you can see the complete list of systems and their characteristics in Appendix D (starting on page 45) of the 2022 NPS National Inventory System List.

For more photos of shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon, please click here.  

Enough Teases, Here’s What’s New and Updated for the Start of 2021!

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Ventura County Railway No. 2
Anyone who knows where I’ve traveled or has visited the site with some frequency over the years may have noticed that the Bus Photo of the Month for January 2021 was from a city that had not been included on Oren’s Transit Page before, and that I’ve been highlighting a number of new website sections over the past few weeks. 

The biggest and most noteworthy additions are the brand new sections for Baltimore, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin.  As I noted in a recent post, there was a certain amount of irony to the fact I grew up 40 miles from Baltimore and am an avid Orioles fan, yet the city had not been featured on this site until recently.  Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin were destinations that I traveled to in late 2019 and early 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to make those trips when I did.  

I also took advantage of some time I had recently to move some photos that had been on the Uncaptioned Photos page for quite awhile and put them in more appropriate places on the website, most notably, the photos of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway now have their own page.  Perhaps you found the new material on your own, but if not, here is the full listing of where new photos were recently added to the site, with new sections highlighted in bold and italics.  

How the Grand Canyon and Transportation are Connected

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On our 2019 summer vacation, after spending several days in Las Vegas with the Oren’s Transit Page extended family, Mrs. OTP and I rented a car to drive to the Grand Canyon for a few more days of vacation on our own.  Our rationale was that seeing as how difficult it is to get to the Grand Canyon and that we were in the general neighborhood so to speak, we might as well take advantage of the opportunity to go since neither one of us had been there before.  We were just two of the 5,974,411 people to visit the Grand Canyon that year, but getting there is not a simple unless one lives very close to the Grand Canyon itself.  

View of the Grand Canyon, August 20, 2019

Today, about 90 percent of visitors to the Grand Canyon go to the South Rim, and we were among them.  The South Rim is about a 4 hour drive from Phoenix and about a 5 hour drive from Las Vegas.  The closest airport with commercial service to the South Rim is Flagstaff, only about 90 minutes away from the Grand Canyon by car, but service there is limited to flights to and from Phoenix. Dallas, and Denver, so most would need to connect in order to get there.  However, prior to the improvement of area roads in the 1960s, getting to the Grand Canyon was even more complicated than it is today.  

For the first half of the 20th Century, basically the only way in to and out of what is now Grand Canyon Village was by public transport of various sorts.  At first, travelers had to hire buggies or rent horses from the tour operators who set up along the South Rim starting in the 1890s in order to travel from the railroad depots at Williams, Flagstaff, or Ash Fork to the canyon.  train.  The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway built a 64 mile long branch line from Williams in order to bring tourists to the canyon’s edge, before the area was part of the National Park System.  The line was completed in 1901.  The railway also built the El Tovar Hotel adjacent to its Grand Canyon station.  One could make a very strong argument that if it weren’t for the railroad, the critical mass needed to advocate for preserving the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon might not have been realized so quickly, and the area would not have come under the jurisdiction of the federal government in 1906 and ultimately the National Park Service in 1919.  

Grand Canyon Railway Depot

Grand Canyon Railway Depot, August 20, 2019

While the branch line to the South Rim was not used by passenger services after 1968 and freight service after 1974 until private investors and operators reinstated the service in 1989, it has become quite popular since its restoration.  There is at least one round trip each day from Williams to the South Rim, and about 25,000 passengers use the line each year.  For many years, there was an organized transfer between the Southwest Chief at the Williams Junction Amtrak Station and the Williams Depot used by the Grand Canyon Railway, though this was discontinued at the end of 2017.  

EMD F40PH 239

EMD F40PH 239 at the Grand Canyon Railway Depot, August 20, 2019

Once at the park itself, transit still plays an important role in how people get around.  The National Park Service has operated a system of shuttle bus routes along the South Rim since 1974, in order to reduce vehicular traffic within the park itself.  In fact, to get to viewpoints along the Hermit Road, one must use the shuttles at certain times of year.  The system works quite well, as the buses allow hikers who do not wish to walk along the 13 miles of the South Rim where shuttle bus service is available to use the bus for some segments instead.    

New Flyer C40LF C-10

New Flyer C40LF C-10 at Hermit’s Rest, August 20, 2019

So while the transportation at the Grand Canyon today is not a conventional public transit system, it is difficult to imagine what the Grand Canyon National Park would look like were it not for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway bringing tourists to the South Rim in the early 20th century or the shuttle bus system that has been in operation since the 1970s.  And for those hardy travelers who wish to experience the difficulties of getting to the even more remote North Rim (where only ten percent of Grand Canyon visitors go), despite being only about 10 miles from the South Rim Visitor Center as the crow flies, it is a 225 mile, 5 hour long drive from one rim to the other.