Lynden residents Mark and Pam Van Dyke own only one car, so Mark takes the bus to work at Logos Bible Software, in downtown Bellingham.

So do at least five of his co-workers. But about two months ago, the Lynden-to-Bellingham routes started getting crowded. “There’s fewer seats available,” he said.

At a time when gas in Bellingham is averaging $4.42 a gallon, Whatcom Transportation Authority buses are carrying more passengers than ever, leading to standing-room-only buses on even some rural routes. For example, last week was the first time people ever had to stand on the Gooseberry Point-to-downtown-Bellingham route.

In the first three months of this year, total ridership has increased 38.3 percent — about 335,000 more rides — over the same time period last year.

“It’s blowing me away,” said Rick Nicholson, director of service development at WTA. He’s had more complaints of crowding and requests for additional buses than he’s seen in his nearly two decades at WTA. “We have some trips where people are standing all the way from Kendall to Bellingham, practically an hour.”

But solutions aren’t going to be easy, because WTA can’t afford more bus service, he said.

In January, WTA boosted service by about 10 percent by adding a fifth Go Line and more service to rural areas, but that’s stretched the fleet of 53 buses to the limit, Pete Stark, WTA’s director of fleet and facilities, wrote in a staff report. During morning rush hours, 46 of them are simultaneously on the road.

Meanwhile, 33 of the aging buses are experiencing equipment breakdowns and need replacing. But the Federal Transit Administration threw a wrench in WTA’s roughly $16 million bus replacement project by saying it couldn’t provide nearly $13 million because it spent all the grant money in five other urban areas, said Steve Clancy, WTA’s finance director. Now, WTA, which was counting on that money, is re-evaluating its plan, and options include delaying bus purchases or borrowing to pay for them. That’s only part of the problem.

“Even if we had 100 buses, we don’t have the drivers or the money to roll out that service,” Nicholson said, adding that it costs about $400,000 a year to operate a bus.

So adding more service could mean asking voters to increase the sales tax, increasing the price to ride, persuading other local governments to help pay and introducing more bulkpass purchasing promotions, Nicholson said. Any request to increase the sales tax, the bulk of WTA’s revenue, would have to come from the community, he said.

During the first three months of 2008, WTA got $4.2 million from sales taxes — about 83 percent of its income — but that was still $1.1 million less in sales taxes than it had budgeted.

Staff will ask the WTA board how to address the high demand. Board members will also consider how they want to pay to replace buses.

Record ridership increases have been fueled largely by Western Washington University students using their new universal bus passes, which they first got before fall term. On some WWU routes, buses have to leave students at the curb because there’s not even standing room available.

Nicholson said total ridership will decrease now that spring term is over, but that may not relieve crowding from the longer rural routes, where most of the complaints are coming from.

“People who have to stand for five to 10 minutes, generally, we don’t get complaints about that. But people who have to stand for longer periods of time, understandably, they don’t like that,” Nicholson said. “Other than routes to the university, we’ve never had routes where people standing is the norm. Now it’s becoming more the norm.”