When Joseph Widner took over the Central Oregon Breeze from his parents in 2005, the company operated four buses with service from Bend to Portland. Today, he owns eight buses, sales have more than doubled, and he is looking for a larger location from which to operate the business. It’s currently on Plateau Drive in northeast Bend.

The Breeze runs 362 days a year and has 11 regular stops between Bend and Portland, including the airports in Redmond and Portland and Union Station, home to Amtrak. General adult fares cost $52 one-way and $95 round-trip, according to the website.

During peak season, from mid-November through the first week of January and June through the week of Labor Day, he said a second bus operates to keep up with demand.

“I myself have driven back and forth to Portland for years … and there’s that point where you only remember those curves where you have to pay attention, where the bathroom breaks are and the rest is just trees going by while you’re trying to get to your destination,” he said. “The neat thing about our service is I can get 10, 15 people on a bus that get to sit there and enjoy the view and relax for two or three hours and get to make that time their own. Take a nap. Get some work done on your laptop. Look out the window.”

Widner said ridership has increased every year since he took over. His parents originally started the company in 1992.

While Widner wouldn’t disclose how many passengers ride his bus every year, he said,“For the amount of times I go back and forth to Portland, and the amount of people that ride my bus, I save the state of Oregon more than 2.5 million road miles, if all the passengers on my bus had driven their own vehicles.”

A new 25-passenger bus costs between $150,000 and $200,000. And each year, Widner said he spends tens of thousands of dollars to maintain his buses.

“Safety’s your number one job,” he said. “So if you’re buses aren’t being maintained regularly and you aren’t spending thousands of dollars maintaining each and every bus every year, you’re not running a legitimate operation.”

In addition to the shuttle service to Portland, he said, the Breeze also operates a charter service locally and throughout the Pacific Northwest.

“The majority of the growth in our business over the last five years has been charter business,” he said, adding charter sales doubled in both 2012 and 2013.

—Reporter: 541-617-7818,

rrees@bendbulletin.com

Q: What makes your transportation service different?

A: Drivers enjoy their customers and their customers enjoy the drivers, whether their favorite driver is Lyle the Cowboy, who’s been here for 14, 15 years, or if it’s Captain Kirk the fishing boat captain who works seasonally and comes back with new fishing stories from the Bering Sea every year… They engage the passengers as much as they do take care of the rest of their job and position. Safety is their number one job and their number two job is just making sure the passengers get a better experience than just some place to sit for a three-and-a-half or four-hour trip to Portland.

Q: Where do you see the company in the next five years?

A: We’d be in a new location that was ideal for the services we provide. I would see new equipment, new buses … The reality of the regular route is it’s a service that’s always going to be needed and is going to grow as time grows and the population grows here and as the dynamics of travel change. As fuel costs go up, there’s less motivation for people to drive their cars back and forth to Portland.