Virginia Transit Association

272 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 For drivers, high fuel prices and inflationary increases in the cost of goods (tires, brakes, etc.) and services (insurance, mechanics) have made the operation of an automobile expensive. Supply chain challenges have also made maintaining or upgrading one’s vehicle difficult if not outright impossible. For public transit, our current challenges arise from staffing shortages (primarily from operators or mechanics), supply chain issues, and changing travel patterns (either temporary or permanent). As vaccination rates increase and the pandemic wanes, these challenges have spurred Virginia’s public transportation systems to become more innovative, flexible, and creative. But…it doesn’t take much to notice that Virginia’s public transportation network is not your parents’ old mass transit system. Just get on any bus in Richmond, Virginia and you will probably notice two things. The first is that the public has returned to public transportation and the second is that no one will ask you for your fare. If you were to compare ridership to pre- pandemic numbers, the metric that everyone is using to figure out if transportation (including planes, trains, buses, and automobiles) is returning to “normal”, you might not ever know that the pandemic happened in Richmond. For FY 2022, the Greater Richmond Transit Company’s (GRTC) ridership is on pace to exceed its pre-pandemic ridership (FY 2019) by nearly 4 percent! One of the reasons for GRTC’s great ridership growth is partly due to an innovative program created in 2020 by then Governor Ralph Northam and the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (VDRPT) called the Transit Ridership Incentive Program or TRIP. The TRIP program, which receives about half a percent of every state transportation dollar, allows DRPT to support two types of programs that are normally very difficult to fund through traditional public transportation capital or operating grant programs – multi-jurisdictional regional routes and reduced or zero-fare programs. VI RGINIA TRANSI T ASSOCIAT ION Before the pandemic, there were more academic case studies written on transit systems attempting zero-fare programs than transit agencies actually operating zero-fare programs. As the pandemic spread, stay-at-home orders were issued, infection transmission concerns rose, and transit ridership plunged --- the leadership at GRTC realized the importance of the essential worker (including several hospitals and healthcare facilities) who relied on their system to get them around and decided in March of 2020 to go zero-fare. Thanks to COVID relief funding GRTC was able to maintain