The Transit Commission met 03/22/2022. They received a brief update regarding the Valley Transit II service. This is curb to curb transportation service, provided by a contracted company Running, Inc, to elderly and disabled individuals who are unable to use the fixe route bus system.
It has been the subject of discussion at the last couple Transit Commission meetings due to the struggles they were having providing rides in a timely manner. The basic problem had been that they were having a very hard time attracting drivers, so they were trying to solve the timeliness issues by hiring more drivers and also improving efficiencies with their scheduling/route planning software.
Valley Transit General Manager Ron McDonald told the commission that Running, Inc was still experiencing difficulties, although they were working to overcome those. He then let Running, Inc representative Paul Woodward speak.
Paul reported that Running had a net gain of three employees over the past week. They were currently going through the training process and would hopefully start giving rides in the next week or two which would help reduce some of the wait times.
Running was also working with the company Ecolane on their scheduling software to try and create some more efficiencies. Right now, the program was set up to try to spread rides evenly among drivers, but they were trying to tighten that up and make it more efficient so that they didn’t have multiple drivers showing up at multiple places in the same area to pick up multiple riders. [It sounded like they wanted to have one driver pick up multiple riders who were in the same general area.] They were trying to really minimize the amount of dead miles they put on the vehicles and be as efficient as possible with their pickup points.
The commission members did not have any questions, but General Manager McDonald was excited that they had three new employees and mentioned that there was going to be an employment fair in town that both Valley Transit and Running, Inc were going to have booths at in an effort to recruit some more drivers.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=907796&GUID=DA7A0889-44BA-4297-8803-16191036F01C
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