Chatham Area Transit makes moves to make transit more accessible for DOT shuttle riders
Chatham Area Transit announced its first-ever DOT expansion outside the Historic Savannah District in late October. What was a fare-free route that made loops around Downtown and Forsyth Park has now extended to the Cloverdale and Historic Carver Village neighborhoods.
Plagued with persistent delays and driver shortages exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, executive director Faye DiMassimo said the issues impacted CAT’s service reliability. The delays and operator shortages meant that CAT wasn’t always picking up or dropping off riders on time.
“We just weren't providing the service that we know people needed and wanted and certainly not to the quality that we want to provide. So, we started looking at this systematically across the entire area as to what were our routes that were lower performers, and what were our routes that we could make some modifications to enhance our reliability.”
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The new routes are being called temporary service modifications and will be re-evaluated in a few months. But the expansion is hitting on a glaring problem in west Savannah neighborhoods: transit accessibility.
Areas like west Savannah have been historically overlooked when it comes to investing in neighborhoods. Residents in the area deal with issues such as a lack of sidewalks and limited connectivity to other parts of the city when it comes to travel to work, schools and grocery stores.
"We believe that it was exactly the right thing to do. It would both improve the service there and improve accessibility there. It would do it in a way that was consistent with our goals of equity of serving all communities.”
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DiMassimo believes modifications like this are a sign of widespread future investment in neighborhoods like Cloverdale and Historic Carver Village when it comes to transportation and access.
"We just did a smart grant plus our master transit plan. The project that we focused on for that smart grant is a project that's on the west side of Savannah, and it's to look at how we can begin to think about transit, including micro-transit, reach more deeply into the community and connect people in a much stronger way than what we're able to do with our current, more traditional fixed route and paratransit services."
Nearly three months after the route was established, the CAT team said they've heard a lot of good feedback from the expanded access.
"We thought it was a great opportunity in all the other work that we were doing to try that out. So it was service reliability that initially drove the conversations, and that's how it developed into what you see today."
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Chatham Area Transit DOT shuttle expands to west Savannah GA
