It appears a month into a three year pilot project not a lot of people are getting on the bus.

The Regional Transportation Manager for the Calgary Regional Partnership's On It transit system Ettore Iannacito says they started off with 3 to 5 rides a day in High River but it's been increasing..

He says the biggest challenge is getting the word out.

"No matter how good a job in terms of our marketing and public engagement we find there are still a lot of people who don't know about the service," he says. "So what's happening is they see this nice bus rolling by and they're calling in and they're saying 'We saw this bus, is that a charter bus or is that some kind of service' and we're telling people it's a regional transit pilot that we just launched so where do you want to go, maybe we can get you there."

He says generally things are going about the way he expected.

Overall they were carrying about ten riders a week and the following week that more than doubled and now they've more than tripled the first week's riders. He says the most promising part is they're taking all kinds of calls about where people can buy tickets and what the service is like and hours of operation.

Iannicito says when he worked in the Toronto area and they put out a new route it usually took six months to a year for it to get established and really take off.

He says they hope to expand the number of places where people can get monthly passes since it's much cheaper than paying to ride daily.