‘It’s awesome!’: CET holds Transit to Trails Free Ride Day, Bike & Brunch to acquaint mountain bikers with popular route

(Update: adding video, comment from shuttle user, CET, and Bend Bikes)

BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- Cascades East Transit partnered with Bend Bikes and Discover Your Forest on Friday for a Transit to Trails Free Ride Day, promoting an increasingly popular route that's available all summer.

Representatives from each organization were on hand, helping load bikes onto CET's new 20-bike trailer and offering information to mountain bikers. Included in the event was Bike & Brunch, offering coffee, breakfast pastries and trail food. They offered information about bike maps and and answering questions for transit riders.

Around 60 folks attended the Free Ride Day at the Columbia Street Park & Ride, loading buses from Mt. Bachelor and Cascades East Transit. The event was part of a campaign to increase accessibility to mountain biking trails.

"I'm super-excited to have not only a Bend city bus that's active and able to go all the way up towards the mountain," said Henry Abel, a user of the CET Transit to Trails shuttle.

Cascades East Transit and the two nonprofits partnered to create Transit to Trails shuttle, which runs from mid-June through Labor Day, traveling to Mt. Bachelor and Lava Butte. It aims to reduce congestion during the busy summer months.

The Free Ride Day encouraged folks to try the public transportation service and get cars off the road, on a service similar to Ride the River shuttle.

Derek Hofbauer, the outreach and engagement administrator at CET, said,  "The river shuttle provides thousands of people an option of just parking their car once, riding the shuttle, tubing all day and leaving their car parked." 

The shuttle takes riders to the cascade lakes welcome station, then to Wanoga Sno-park, swampy lakes trailhead, dutchmen flat, and finally to Mt. Bachelor. It's $5 one-way, $9 round-trip Wednesday through Sunday.  

Rosalee Hermens, a member of Bend Bikes' board of directors, said, "My gosh,, there are tens and tens of biking trails, because the way CET goes to these various stops, each of them has multiple trails."

She says it has become popular and riders have already celebrated the shuttle service.

Hofbauer said, "I mean, the people love it. visitors that come to Bend are bragging about it, our locals love it. It's great for riders do not have to shuttle two vehicles. They can just take one car to the park-and-ride, hop on the shuttle."

Hermens said, "So the goal is people should be able to bike anywhere they want to bike safely, including connecting to things like mass transit so that you can access the outdoors."

Cascade East Transit tells us last year only about 1,000 riders took the service. This year, they have already surpassed that and expect to double their riders due to adding a new 20-bike trailer.

 Abel said, "Well, it's awesome! I actually didn't realize it was Free Ride Day until I got here, so that means between the two of us, we've got an extra ten bucks for tacos after the ride."

The shuttle service was first piloted in 2023 and is expected to continue next year. In terms of 2025. Two hundred thousand dollars of funding for the service from the  federal lands access program grant and will support the program next year.