Need a ride to work at night? RCT, NECIC working on $150,000 pilot project

MANSFIELD — What do people do if they work second or third shift but don’t have a way to get to their job and back home again?

The fact is that one in four Americans is unable to regularly and reliably access transportation they require to meet their daily needs, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration.

Richland County Transit and the North End Community Improvement Collaborative hope to help solve the problem by using a $150,000 grant to design a pilot program that could receive up to $750,000 in additional funds to implement.

The local partnership demonstration project is one of only eight selected nationwide by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies aimed at exploring strategies to improve people’s mobility and access to daily needs.

The funding is through a cooperative agreement with the Federal Transit Administration as part of its Mobility, Access, and Transportation Insecurity program. 

The MATI research and demonstration program is identifying ways to address challenges that stand in the way of people’s ability to access public transportation.

CTS’s MATI team selected community projects to tackle barriers and find ways to improve transit access and find solutions for caregivers, low-income families, second- and third-shift workers, older adults, and women. 

RCT and NECIC were notified of the grant award in June, the only such grant awarded in Ohio.

They enlisted the support of Christy Campoll, a senior associate with R&L Associates from Dayton, the consulting company that helped RCT develop its 10-year strategic development plan in 2023.

One of the key “unmet needs” identified in the 10-year plan was “better workforce mobility” through extended early-morning and evening services.

As part of the pilot program development process, meetings were conducted Wednesday at NECIC with employers, workers, transit users, educational leaders, elected officials and more to gather information about local needs — and also disseminate data on what’s been found already.

“The University of Minnesota got a $6 million research grant to use in finding communities that are trying to do good works and seeing if it’s replicable in other small urban transit agencies because we are one of the few small urbans on the list,” said Jean Taddie, transit development manager for the Richland County Regional Planning Commission.

“It is ultimately 100 percent federal money and we were blessed to not have to have a local match for this grant,” she said.

The goal of the pilot plan is to develop methods to overcome work-related transportation barriers in the late evenings and early mornings when RCT is not operating its normal fixed-route services.

Organizers have researched where people go to work most on second- and third-shifts and also the areas with the highest densities of zero-vehicle households. They found north end and downtown residents, for example, have some of the highest rates of zero-vehicle households.

Taddie said the local pilot project must be submitted to the University of Minnesota by July 31 at the end of Phase One of the project. That’s when award recipients will attend an in-person convening to share ideas and best practices.

At the conclusion of Phase 1, all eight sites will be eligible to apply for Phase 2 funding to carry out their demonstration projects. Up to four sites will be selected for funds to implement their pilot programs.

The pilot project is in the NECIC’s wheelhouse, according to Tony Chinni, the organization’s interim CEO.

“Many people have pointed out the central portion of Mansfield is the concentration of low income, the concentration of folks that don’t have vehicles, and a big part of that is the north end that we serve,” Chinni said Wednesday.

One possible part of the pilot project could include more smaller vehicles to assist in economically providing reservation or on-demand transportation via point-to-point services.

“We do have some smaller cutaway vehicles and we did downsize a bit on our big buses towards the favor of the cutaways, but even the potential to have vans. There are some services where you can lease vans and a driver,” Taddie said.

“I can’t say what our final plan is going to look like, but I’ll say there’s a lot of options and the smaller vehicles would be more economical,” she said.

“We balance that also with having good ADA access because we know plenty of (RCT) riders that don’t have a vehicle do fit that category as well,” Taddie said.

“That would all be part of this. How many staff, how many drivers do we need to do this, the number of vehicles we need to do this, how many vehicles would we have out on the road during the first pilot year?” Taddie said.

“All of that needs to be worked out in determining what size of vehicles we need and whether we would lease them or buy them, etc.,” she said.

(Below is a PDF with slides from a MATI Advisory Team meeting on Wednesday at NECIC).