Could this be the future of North Lake Tahoe’s public transportation?

In the early evening hours on a brisk Wednesday, Homewood resident Jarek Sznytzer stood outside waiting with a bag in tow at the newly completed Placer County Transit Center in Tahoe City for his ride: a TART bus.

“It only runs about every hour,” he said. “Every half hour would be nice … Otherwise (the service), it’s good. It’s on time, most of the time.”

Soon after, his bus arrived, and he and two other passengers boarded. The bus idled for a few minutes with its doors open, waiting for possible additional passengers, before departing.

Later, while waiting for her bus inside the $4.8 million transit center, Rosie Ibarra, a student living in Kings Beach, was asked to grade the current state of public transit and comment on what might be improved. Her response to the latter: shorter headways, service hours extended to midnight for those who work into the evenings and service around the lake.

Despite the suggestions, a variety of local and Western transit officials agree: Several challenges unique to this region stand in the way.

“It goes back to that idea of being all things to all people,” said Lynn Rumbaugh, transit manager for the city of Aspen, Colo. “We have a hard time figuring out sometimes how to operate services more efficiently when we have a group of people that are demanding really fast frequency. They want service at 2 a.m., (and others) they want service 6 a.m. We have services that we really should probably run year-round, but we can only afford to run them in the offseason.”

Rumbaugh and roughly 60 other people, ranging from Western ski resort representatives to regional transit officials to residents, gathered late last month for the 2012 Transit Summit at Truckee Tahoe Airport to discuss how to improve area transit while acknowledging the funding challenges and economic benefits of such an endeavor.

Kent Cashel, director of public works for Park City, Utah, said the city used to have multiple transit systems like North Tahoe currently has, but decided to “integrate” them, rather than keeping them independent or interfacing them.

“We could have one schedule and one look and feel to the buses, so when any user looked at the system, they recognized it, they knew where to get the information and it was simple to use,” he said.

Other characteristics of Park City’s transit system, which is shared by the other resort communities present at the summit — Aspen and Summit County, Colo. — include short headways and extended daily service.

“It’s very common in resort transportation systems that we’re looking at a range of funding sources,” said Walter Kieser, managing principal of Economic and Planning Systems, who was the keynote speaker at the summit. “That’s important because we really want to mix it up, so we have a broad base of financing.”

Rumbaugh said Aspen follows such a system, characterizing it as a “complicated stew.” Public transit costs Aspen approximately $4 million annually, increasing at about 5 percent a year, for a nine-bus fleet and is funded through sales tax, lodging tax, use tax, development fees, grants and parking fees.

“While you benefit from the proximity to the Bay Area and those weekend visitors, in terms of economic development and strengthening, it’s looking at those destination visitors, those people who come and stay longer that … growth can occur,” Kieser said. “Those destination visitors have certain expectations, and increasingly, one of those expectations is to be able to move around easily between the assets in the resort community.”

Richard Anderson, exiting Truckee Town Council member and soon-to-be Nevada County supervisor, stressed the importance of getting destination visitors to travel outside the ski resorts and into the communities in order to spread the wealth.

Transportation can encourage that, Kieser said, either through the placement of bus pick-up/drop-off facilities in the community or bus routes that allow visitors to see the community’s dining and shopping options.

“One thing we know from our work is that the destination visitor is different,” he said. “What people are looking for in terms of a destination often times now mixes it up with not only the recreation skiing, but also dining (and) retail shopping. So downtowns like Truckee are really well placed to build on their existing assists to attract those kinds of visitors.”

Still, the North Shore’s size, its many existing transit options and lack of available state funding, among others, pose unique challenges to a transit system, Kieser said.