Chattanooga Transit Executives Share Coordination Success With Their Knoxville Counterparts

Knoxville Project Action Coaltion

In January, executives from the Chattanooga area traveled to Knoxville to showcase their efforts to improve coordination among local transit services. After a lunch meeting with their Knoxville counterparts the visiting group delivered a presentation to the Knoxville Project Action Coalition. Meeting attendees included representatives of the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA), the Southeast Tennessee Human Resource Agency (SETHRA), and the Special Transit Services (STS).

The three separate agencies determined that by working together to provide coordinated demand response transit services throughout the Chattanooga area they could increase their capacity and carry more passengers. Demand response service is usually provided by vans equipped with wheel-chair lifts. Trips are made by reservation and passengers are picked up at their homes and taken to their destination. Knoxville's demand response transit services are organized similarly to Chattanooga's. The Knoxville-area providers include Knoxville Area Transit (KAT), Knox County CAC Transit, and the East Tennessee Human Resource Agency (ETHRA).

Before the coordination effort began in Chattanooga it was not uncommon to see different agencies' vans serving areas near each other or vans sitting idle while waiting to pick up a passenger for a return trip. Seeking ways to consolidate efforts the agencies reached out to their funding partners ? the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) ? to find ways of overcoming regulations that seemed to prohibit coordination. They discovered many of the perceived "road-blocks" were not as difficult to overcome as originally thought.

Having established that coordination was possible, the agencies began to tackle the problem of how to deal with trading off trips that would be better provided by another service. They established web-cams so the staff could see each other and share information easily. After some initial success, they determined it would be even more efficient if they could put the trip reservationists and dispatchers for all three agencies together in one room. To date STS and SETRHA have moved into offices together with CARTA expected to join them soon.

Early data suggests an increased trip capacity of 20% will be realized in the Chattanooga area because of the coordination efforts.

The Knoxville region was selected by the Easter Seals Project Action organization as one of ten communities across the United States to participate in the 2011 Accessible Transportation Coalitions Initiative (ATCI). A goal of the Coalition is to foster cooperation between the transportation industry and the disability community to increase mobility for people with disabilities. One key way to accomplish this goal is by improving the coordination of the transit services in the Knoxville region. For additional information see the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) website at www.knoxtrans.org. Please contact Doug Burton at MPC if you are interested in attending a meeting of the Knoxville Project Action Coalition (doug.burton@knoxmpc.org or 865-215-3824). For more information on Easter Seals Project Actiongo to www.projectaction.easterseals.com.

Posted 2-22-2012, written by Doug Burton