By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph city officials have helped to make some changes to the city's transit system.
City Manager Bryan Carter says the buses that travel around the city have gone through a major revision.
"Might have noticed over the last week you're seeing some new branding on the busses, you know we've seen the Ride for a long time, but after a lot of work that's been retired and replace with Go St. Joe," Carter tells KFEQ Hotline host Barry Birr. "So, it's just going to be a new look."
And along with that new look comes some new routes following a route study city officials did over two years Carter says.
"They take our overall number of routes from 12 to 8 with some demand service added as well," Carter explains. "So, where you reach out and say hey, we're here we need picked up."
Carter says reducing the number of bus routes from 12 to 8 helped make the routes more centralized.
"It made a focus on the areas where we have the most riders, so in the same way you see traffic increase on certain throw fairs during busy times, kind of your rush hour traffic, of course St. Joe we're pretty fortunate our rush hour is not too bad," Carter points out. "But, in rush hour traffic you see something similar on the bus system, so we'll have some more resources dedicated to those times."
Carter says city officials and transit officials have also begun to see the number of bus riders steadily increasing back to pre-pandemic numbers.
Carter says along with the changes to the buses and travel routes, the city also made changes to several bus stops and bus shelters around the city thanks to federal grant money.
Carter says it's been quite some time since the transit system in the city has seen major changes.
"It's been really about 25 years I think since our last major refresh of our bus routes and of course we've seen a lot of development, a lot of changes in the city over those years," Carter explains. "And over time what happens is you end up plugging in new stops here and there, and you can do that for quite a while pretty efficiently, however after a while you've kind of patchworked it together quite a bit."
Carter says the changes to the transit system is a refresh to get rid of all that patchwork done over the years, comparing the refresh to rebooting your computer when it gets slow.