Ridership on UCHRA’s Go Routes has increased some 82 percent in the last fiscal year.
UCHRA’s Executive Committee received the latest figures on transportation successes during Monday’s meeting. Executive Director Mark Farley said that fuel consumption, average daily trips, and the number of people using these services have all improved.
“The number of people we have in the bus on average with every trip is up,” Farley said. “Our overtime is down. Our driver’s salaries are up and we feel like we’re getting to a far more stabilized position and we feel like that we’re able to provide more services,” Farley said.
Go Routes provide scheduled bus service in Cookeville, Algood, Crossville, and McMinnville. He said the annual increase means a difference of hundreds of people per day. Farley said the buses are not full every day or all day long, but it is exciting to see far more people using them on a regular basis.
“It used to be we would see the vans and they’d have one or two people in it,” Farley said. “I was over at Walmart, (Putnam County) Mayor (Randy) Porter, pumping gas and I saw the van come around by Walmart and that thing was full.”
Public Transportation Director Holly Montooth said UCHRA employees have worked hard to get the organization’s Pick Up Upper Cumberland app to the same quality it was at when the organization had a direct partnership with Uber. Montooth said there was a decrease in ridership from the ride sharing program when the partnership ended but that number is back on the rise.
“This is the wave of the future for transportation,” Montooth said. “It might not be now, but it’s going to be in the future so we are trying to prepare ourselves for that change and this is one of the first ways that we do that.”
Farley said UCHRA offers three main public transportation services: scheduled runs, ride share services in Putnam and Cumberland Counties, and the Go Routes. Farley said UCHRA officials are looking into adding Go Routes to other communities in the Upper Cumberland.
“We’re running routes all day long,” Farley said. “Just like Nashville runs routes or Knoxville or any of the big cities have the big buses, we’ve got the smaller vans, but we’re running routes just like that.”
Farley said part of the increase the result of a software change about a year and a half ago. Farley said there were some hiccups throughout the software transition but the public transportation system has come out on the other side far better than it was before. Farley said the organization’s on-time arrival rate is only at ninety-four percent because of the different types of people it transports.
“You may look at that and say, well why aren’t you at a hundred percent?” Farley said. “Got to keep in mind though, we transport a lot of people in wheelchairs and if we’re putting this client in a wheelchair and something goes wrong and it throws us of for about five, ten minutes, takes us a little longer than we thought, that puts us behind on the rest of the trip.”
