TACT General Manager Patti Lynn Baker said over 66% of riders do not have alternate transportation if there was not public bus service.
FORD CITY - Borough council members heard information about Town and Country Transit bus service on Monday night at the Ford City public meeting.
Ford City will make an annual payment this year of approximately $10,000 toward bus service in that municipality. Kittanning Borough will pay over $13,000.
TACT General Manager Patti Lynn Baker said for every dollar of the local money paid by the member municipalities, the State kicks in $13.65 to fund transportation in Armstrong County.
Baker said the busses get a bad rap because observers see a snapshot of the ridership rather than the whole picture.
“I hear it every place I go , ‘those buses ride round empty’. Well, yes and no. Sometimes, they are empty. Sometimes it just happens to be that we picked someone up and they got off and there might not be someone on. They could be a shared-ride vehicle traveling to someone’s house.”
Baker said the transit authority did a survey last January that interviewed riders and non-riders alike. She said the information gathered was surprising.
” I was really surprised to see 65.6% of our ridership that responded to our survey, they have no alternate transportation at all. So, you might think 37,220 trips, that’s not much, but when you think 66% have no alternate transportation, that’s a lot. All of us in this room - we get in our car and we don’t think about it because we’re so used to going when we want to. But for 66% of these people, they don’t have another way to go.”
Information is crucial to member municipalities that make up the transit authority. PennDOT recently conducted a consolidation study that suggested combining TACT with the Indiana County authority, IndiGO. Member municipalities have been meeting to decide if the consolidation would best serve ridership in the future.
According to Baker, TACT also offers commuter service several times per week to Butler and downtown Pittsburgh.
Councilman Tyson Klukan discussed the possibility of placing bus shelters at various locations in Ford City. Lenape Tech students recently installed a shelter near the Adult Learning Center. Baker said she has shelters in storage and would like to see municipalities install them for the convenience of the riders.
For more information about bus schedules, call the TACT office at 724-548-8696.