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Asheville’s bus system has been a weighty topic this election season.
During a contentious year and a half of research and proposals for changing the city’s transit system, the candidates for City Council have strong opinions on the future of the Asheville Rides Transit system.
There are six candidates running for Council. Three – Sheneika Smith, Maggie Ullman, and Antanette Mosley – are incumbents. The others – Jeffrey Borroughs, Keith Young, and Drew Ball – are challengers. Only three will win a seat.
The bus system has been struggling to balance a declining ridership and rapidly expanding population. Its ridership slid from over 6,433 weekly riders in 2019 to around 4,448 in 2025, according to the National Transit Database. Meanwhile, over half of ART's bus fleet will need replacing soon.
In March 2025, the city commissioned a $300,000 study from independent consultant group Jarrett Walker and Associates, intended to result in a final plan for modernizing the bus system and making it solvent.
In June, the city was presented with the proposal: a network that decreased average wait times while cutting some routes altogether. Under the plan, 90-minute routes would have been eliminated, and 15- to 30-minute routes would increase in frequency. South Asheville, including the Asheville Regional Airport, would have seen increased bus service, while routes to neighborhoods like Kenilworth and Beaverdam would have been cut. The city said that the new plan prioritized frequent service to low-income areas.
A briefing last November grew contentious, according to the Asheville Watchdog. Incumbent Sheneika Smith expressed concern about coverage for children, the elderly, and disabled residents.
At the time, incumbents Maggie Ullman, and Antanette Mosley spoke out against cutting entire routes from the transit system.
“I feel strongly about all of them,” Mosley said to the Council last July.
Ullman said she felt she could not justify a vote in favor of cutting routes.
The proposal caused a strong response from Council, community members, and local business, and was pulled before Council could vote on Aug. 25.
More recently, at a campaign forum in October called “Get There AVL,” all of the candidates stressed the importance of sacrificing neither ridership nor routes, but instead find a way to increase revenue for the system overall.
Candidate and current Buncombe County Commissioner Drew Ball connected transit to affordable housing.
“We need to build housing on our transit corridors,” said Ball. “Folks are utilizing the bus because the more people that utilize public transit, the more funding we make as a community and that helps us pull in state and federal dollars to support our public transit.”
“I'd really like to focus on thinking about housing, mobility, land use, and resilience as one subject, rather than four different cycles,” Burroughs said, owner of Burroughs Fine Jewelry and Design Studio and Gallery Melange. As a business owner, he said, he tries to walk most places. He expressed support for bus routes that run every 15 minutes, as opposed to the hour to 90 minute intervals many routes currently run on.
Maggie Ullman concurred, suggesting a quarter cent sales tax to fund improvements. That move would require working with the county, because state law only allows tax referendums on the county level.
“If we did that, we would take our current $13 million dollar transit program and add $20 million to it,” Ullman said. “What is important is that we get our county neighbors to understand transit is beneficial to them as well.”
Candidate Keith Young spoke less specifically to the bus system, but spoke in strong favor of pedestrian-friendly investment. He has previously expressed a desire to see Asheville reinvest in historically Black communities, shoring up Helene-impacted infrastructure, and invest in affordable housing near accessible areas of town.
