It’s too loud to talk on the near-empty bus as it clangs and thuds over Franklin’s frost heaves. As Rose Kately tucked her earbuds in, her music made the ride more peaceful.
Kately, in her twenties, lives on the west side of Franklin’s downtown, past the high school, and works at the Tilton outlets. Since she first learned of its existence in November, Kately has relied on the Concord-Laconia Connector – a free bus that links the Lakes Region to Concord via Tilton, Franklin and Boscawen – to get to her job. She hops on behind the Franklin Opera House.
“She walks a mile to this stop,” said Carlos Martinez, who drives the connector most afternoons. While the bus has relatively few riders most of the time, it has a consistent contingent of regulars, including Kately. He knows them well.
Friday is the bus line’s final day.
The connector bus was launched in February 2024 by Concord Area Transit (CAT), the transportation arm of Community Action Program for Belknap and Merrimack Counties. The organization also runs fixed routes in Concord as well as door-to-door services and rides for seniors.
Running back and forth from Penacook to Laconia, the connector was a few-times-per-day route helpful for those getting to work or medical appointments between bedroom and commercial hubs in central New Hampshire. It made stops at the new Market Basket at Merchant’s Way, the county jail and nursing home, downtown Franklin, multiple shopping centers in Tilton, the Belknap Marketplace and Downtown Laconia, among others.
The connector will stop running because of too few riders.
“The costs for running it were much higher than any of our other routes because the ridership was so low,” said CAT Transportation Director Terri Paige. “We just fiscally couldn’t justify continuing to run it with those numbers.”
Even though the connector was fare-free – like all Concord Area Transit lines – ridership tallies matter.
The connector had just about 5,800 rides during the last fiscal year (note that the service tracks individual rides, not unique riders). That’s less than half the 12,000 annual rides projected at the outset, Paige said. Even so far this year, the average was 600 total rides per month, putting the connector on track for the low-7,000 range.
Meanwhile, public transit ridership within Concord continues to steadily climb.
The operational cost per ride for the bus to Laconia came in around $60, Paige said. For the regular routes crisscrossing Concord hourly, the cost is between $6 and $12 per ride. Suspending the connector means resources can be directed back towards CAT’s more popular lines. For example, Paige noted, they’ve had open driving positions that have been tough to fill. The connector drivers can help fill those routes.
Martinez, who been with CAT for three years, drives a bus for seniors in the morning and said he’ll probably do that during the shifts that he had been driving the connector.
A dump truck drove by as the bus waited at a stop sign. Its box was painted with a sign that announced the construction company was hiring CDL drivers.
Martinez could be one of them, he said. He has the license. But he prefers working with people, he said, and the hours with Concord’s public transit are regular, daytime shifts.
The people he sees losing out most from the end of the bus, he said, are people like Kately.
“Franklin has no public transit,” he said. “So people are really kind of stuck there.”
Martinez also thinks about more than a dozen people on temporary work visas, who use the connector to get to their restaurant jobs on Loudon Road. Or the half-dozen people throughout each week who get on the connector when they’re released from the county jail as a way to get home.
“We’ve had some really disappointed folks, no doubt about it,” Paige said. “It’s a disappointment for me not to be able to continue the route.”
While much of Concord Area Transit’s funding is federal – roughly two-thirds of its $1.6 million budget last year – it must put up a match to receive it, relying on money from the state, local communities and private donors to do that. How much money the agency gets from the federal Department of Transportation, as well as how much donors are willing to provide, is underwritten by the number of people using a given service.
The connector was funded out of CAT’s regular budget, but the initial match came from the county through pandemic relief dollars. Those are now out of the picture, leaving a $100,000 hole in matching funding that would have had to come from local communities and donors. The cities of Franklin and Laconia said they could not contribute to fill it.
The majority of people who use CAT buses, according to Monitor reporting, either don’t have a vehicle or share one with others. Riders are most often commuters, but people running errands or attending personal appointments are typical users.
The connector was initially envisioned as a commuter route, especially for industrial sites and hospitals, some of which have their own stops. People who work in the Tilton outlets are among the most common daily users, Paige said, but uptake region-wide just didn’t materialize.
That could be because of the route’s four-hour loop time.
“It didn’t really, I think, fit for some of the purposes that people were hoping to use it for,” Paige said. “It was kind of difficult to try to line up shift schedules for some of the employers, and we actually got feedback that the wait time was too long for people trying to use it to go shopping.”
Paige remains convinced a real need still exists for public transit connectivity between central New Hampshire cities. Maybe in the future an arrangement could be reached that would be more practical, she said. Notably, if Laconia had its own in-town route, it would reduce the distance and time covered by the connector.
“I feel like that’s a needed service,” Paige said. “We just have to find the solution that works both fiscally and where the ride generators are.”
Among the three routes that operate in Concord – one running north-south along Route 3 to Penacook, another running along Loudon Road to the Heights and one winding across the city – ridership remains strong, Paige said.
Concord’s buses went fare-free during the pandemic and have remained so. Ridership has steadily climbed. After a 10% increase in 2024, rides rose another 8% last year to more than 118,000. Ridership in the city has nearly doubled since 2021, when there were 63,000 rides.
Pandemic relief money and the bipartisan infrastructure law brought a flush of resources to rural transit agencies – Concord’s system is classified as rural – nationwide in recent years, but matching funds and ridership can restrict expansion.
During last year’s budget cycle, state officials initially proposed slashing the money the state provides to local transit agencies as matching support for federal dollars. That proposal was walked back, and CAT received about $166,000 in matching funds from the state last year.
Still, the local transit network relies on municipalities – including Concord – to piece together matching dollars. The city of Concord makes up more than half of the $265,000 in local and municipal revenue received by the agency. With more state costs downshifted to municipalities, rising health insurance and labor rates, and other local pressures on the rise, it’s not getting any easier for towns to set it aside.
“Municipalities and even the counties are really stretched in their budgets and trying to make sure that folks are able to have a lower tax rate, because they understand that burden,” she said. “So, trying to raise funds through traditional ways is getting harder and harder.”
The bus will be back in Concord around 7:30 p.m. Friday after its final loop to Laconia.