MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Mountain Line Transit Authority is on schedule to resume fare collections on the Route 50 Don Knotts line with some caveats.
Mountain Line CEO Maria Smith offered an update on WAJR’s Talk of the Town Monday, where she discussed the December 1st timeline for the resumption of fare collections on the line as well as new agreements made with local officials and social service agencies. This will include the establishment of a new community access bus pass that will be funded through the City of Morgantown as well as a separately funded program supported through the Monongalia County Commission.
“We have two programs that we are starting, one of them is the community access pass, and the second part is with the county, they are providing bridge funding ahead of time,” said Smith.
The two fully funded programs will include opportunities to get bus passes in the City of Morgantown municipal buildings and the social service hub Hazel’s House of Hope. The City of Morgantown’s program in association with Mountain Line will establish the new “Community Access Pass,” which will allow for free ridership for downtown locations as well as Hazel’s House of Hope location on Scott Avenue. The county will support a separate program where free ridership passes will be funded with Mountain Line distributing them to social service agencies on a request-by-need basis. The new programs were made in response to a significant change in ridership that affected costs for Mountain Line.
“These passes are going to be distributed through different city entities,” said Smith regarding how the City of Morgantown funded “Community Access Passes” will be offered to low-income residents. “With the county (supported program), the social service agencies would have to contact us and purchase passes through that funding,” she said regarding the county-funded bus passes.
The resumption of the collection of fares that will coincide stems from Mountain Line and social service providers data that showed a significant amount of overuse of the Route 50 Don Knotts line. The original $35,000 contract agreed upon with support from the City of Morgantown was estimated at 75 cents per rider, which eventually led to a rider increase of over 50 percent, a decent number of whom used the bus for needs other than for travel to address social services. This in turn led to a need to renegotiate the contract that is currently in place with social services at Hazel’s House of Hope, which had become beyond cost-effective for Mountain Line.
“We found that there were a lot of trips that were non-destination trips or just not necessary,” said Smith on the factors that lead to the discontinuation of the current free bus rider program that expires in less than a week. “And then the last thing we looked at was the geospatial data, and it showed that a lot of the trips were beginning and ending outside of the social services,” she said.
Ahead of the resumption of fare collections on the Route 50 Don Knotts Line, the City of Morgantown agreed in July to financially support the costs to provide free ridership until a new agreement was established. As part of the new programs, data will be collected on the amount of ridership that will take place so a new contract can be put into place for free ridership on the route in the future. The hope for the Mountain Line Transit Authority is to create rider affordability for Morgantown area residents in need of the service while remaining cost-effective for the service provider.
“At the end of this we are looking to have enough data to find out what the actual need is for the social services as far as transportation,” said Smith. “And kind of be able to put a number of trips value and a dollar value to it and see what it’s going to take to continue this service,” she said.