Petersburg Area Transit

282 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 transferred to ships bound for the Chesapeake Bay and beyond. Returning ships with manufactured goods would complete the cycle of trade. Petersburg also had an extensive early rail system – one that was crucial to the supplying of Confederate troops during the Civil War. By the end of the conflict, many of its trains and tracks had been destroyed by various brigades of the Union army. After the war, Petersburg rebuilt its railroads, but the city never quite regained its former economic position as much of its former shipping traffic was steadily moving to the Norfolk Seaport. Today, Petersburg is still a transportation hub for the region, with proximity to two Interstate Highways: 85 and 95; and three U.S. Routes: 1, 301, and 460. It also houses transportation centers of both the CSX and Norfolk Southern Railways, and it’s a stop on Amtrak’s busiest route, the Northeast Regional line. Within the confines of the city, and extending outward in several directions, public transportation of the area’s residents, visitors, and commuters are the responsibility of Petersburg Area Transit (PAT), which transports, on average, 57,000 passengers a month, connecting people, jobs, and communities. PAT provides fixed-route transit and ADA paratransit services throughout the city of Petersburg, while its service also extends into the cities of Hopewell and Colonial Heights, as well as portions of Prince George, Dinwiddie, and Chesterfield counties. In addition, PAT offers connections to downtown Richmond via its Freedom Express Route and the greater United States via Greyhound from its central Multimodal Passenger Station. For the last five-and-a-half years, PAT has been under the leadership of Charles Koonce Jr., its Director of Mass Traffic. A former law enforcement officer and transportation professional, when Koonce first arrived at his post, he reveals that he felt that while the city was providing transportation for its residents, it wasn’t taking advantage of the magnitude of the possibilities available to it. Since that PETERSBURG AREA TRANSI T time, Koonce has expanded PAT’s portfolio, its infrastructure, and its reach in many ways. “When I came to Petersburg, we had an aging fleet,” he recalls. “The average bus here had over a million miles on it, which is pretty much unheard of. In addition, no one had taken a good look at the routing system in almost 40 years. So, the challenge for me, in the beginning, was to revamp the whole transit system.” Koonce quickly went to work with the State Department of Rails and Public Transportation and, with its help, replaced every bus in the system. “Now, the average 30 or 40-foot bus usually runs anywhere from 350,000 miles up to a million miles depending on the type of buses, such as hybrid or electric,” he continues. “When I surveyed the routes, I realized that we didn’t need so many big buses, so I converted some of the routes to medium-duty buses. I kept five or six big buses and the rest were medium-duties.