43
WRTA bus ridership up 5 percent
YOUNGSTOWN
Despite the bitter cold winter at the beginning of 2014, the total Western Reserve Transit Authority bus ridership for that year was 5 percent above that of the previous year, authority trustees learned Thursday.
Last year’s ridership totaled 1,551,498, James Ferraro, the authority’s executive director, reported.
December 2014 ridership totaled 128,879, compared with 117,447 the previous December, for a gain of 10 percent, he said.
Average daily ridership was 4,957 last month.
Ferraro attributed the increase in part to the authority’s advertising and marketing efforts.
“As employment picks up, people use the bus more frequently, and I think that that tends to move the ridership up,” he added.
“If you don’t go to work, you might only ride [the bus] two days a week, but if you’re working four or five days a week, it makes an improvement” in frequency of bus ridership, he observed.
Dean Soroka, the authority’s human-resources director, told the board the authority’s administration is considering replacing the private security firm Remco Inc. of Youngstown with city police to guard its Federal Station transit hub in downtown Youngstown.
Remco is serving on a month-to-month basis after the recent expiration of its contract with the authority, he said.
Remco charges the authority $12.29 per guard per hour, and the guards work overlapping shifts, Soroka said.
The charge to the authority would be $21 per hour for each city police officer, but only one city officer likely would need to be on duty at any time, Soroka said. “I think it’s going to make everybody feel safer because the police could deal with problems immediately,” he said.
Unlike private security guards, who can only detain criminal suspects until police arrive to arrest them, city police would have full arrest powers and immediate backup from their colleagues on patrol, when it’s needed, Soroka observed.
Matt Kotanchek, the authority’s maintenance director, reported that he is working with a consultant named Mindboard Inc. of Sterling, Va., on technological improvements, including computer-aided dispatching, to help with scheduling and locating buses.
The improvements also would include computer-generated texts and emails to alert elderly or disabled riders using door-to-door transportation to the estimated arrival time of the bus at the designated pickup location, he said.
The technological improvements also would include on-board automated audible and visible announcements to regular- route bus passengers, which would provide the bus’s current location and the name of the next stop, he said.