Thomas Richards has driven buses for three decades, including 27 summers in Denali National Park and a short stint in Telluride before taking a job with Durango Transit.

During that time, he has become deft at navigating mountain roads and dealing with people from all walks of life.

In addition to the challenges of the job, which have included some scary moments on the road, Richards appreciates the diversity of the clientele who rely on public transportation. Underprivileged and economically challenged people often rely on public transportation, but the service is also vital to tourists, students, blue-collar workers and even those trying to do the environmentally responsible thing by not driving.

This summer, from June 1 through Aug. 31, Durango Transit is offering unlimited free bus rides. The free service is an effort to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, reduce carbon emissions and get more people acquainted with the public transit system.

In honor of the three months of free service, we met up with Richards to get his take on public transpiration.

Richards: Driving in Denali, that tour guide job is basically like mid-May through late September. We could be out there on the park road, which is a narrow gravel road, no guardrails and 1,000-foot drop offs. Then we start getting snow, like a September storm, that would come in and it would start piling up on the road. We had our situations up there where buses might be stuck because of snow or maybe stuck because of a mudslide, stuck on the road for hours. Medical emergencies would happen on occasion because it's a fair amount of our demographic. They are older cruise ship clientele. Not since the ’70s have we ever had any catastrophe like events. There were a couple rollovers in the ’70s, and we really strengthened our training program at that time.

Just being equanimous, and being patient with people who may not have their act together or may have issues that we’re not aware of. Just to be forgiving and not to get angry with people. Not to treat them wrongly. I’m really big on us being diplomats for the town because the transit system is one of the most visible aspects of anything in the town government. It was a huge reflection on this town.

There is a pretty wide variety. I think the demographics are pretty broad as far as age range, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. A nice thing about a transit system like ours is to have a lot of people from all walks of life. There are some people who may not have cars. Then in the tourist aspect with the trolleys, because they’re interesting looking vehicles. We have a lot of people that come to town from all over the place, U.S. and abroad. When they’re in Durango, if not prior, they’ve heard about the trolleys and they want to go for a round-trip ride. We serve quite a lot of the homeless community in town. I think we perform some pretty crucial service for them. Getting them to everything from the soup kitchen to La Plata Family Medicine or to Walmart.

To have a good transit system for a town this size is something different. The fact that we run seven days a week, most of 365 days of the year, just a few holidays where we don’t. It’s the same hours of service, seven days a week instead of only certain days and not on weekends. The fare is different too, because there are plenty of transit systems around that charge more than we do. Much of the ridership is only a dollar, but for quite a lot of the rest of our ridership based on age or disability, it’s only 50 cents for a ride. The passes, I think, are a good rate monthly and annually.

Being socially concerned and environmentally concerned, seeing fewer cars on the road, fewer emissions emitted, fewer fossil fuels used, to me it matters a lot. Alternative transportation I think is big, culturally. We can reach out and we can help to provide a public service. We are providing a much-needed social service for people and getting people where they really need to go. Especially for the underserved and underprivileged communities. I think that’s really invaluable to people.

More funding from the city – from the state government – will certainly increase our availability, to more frequently purchase newer buses, to maintain our bus stops, for our promotional materials, for events. We can have more free days and more free periods that’s going to help encourage and spur more ridership with us.

We do. We see a lot of the more economically challenged side of the community and the less-well-served-by-society side of town. For example, we see the homeless community extensively here, we see the Native American community. I think we see a more well-rounded kind of aspect of Durango. From the underserved, to the college community, to blue-collar community, to the white collar community, to visitors, etc.