Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 6

26 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6 VALLEY TRANS I T recommended for transit staff. Members of the management team sewed 100 masks, and procured donations of 200 more from the community to protect the team. The Maintenance Manager at the time, Bruce McCaw, transitioned into a chemist temporarily in order to produce hand sanitizer in-house until that became available on the market. Valley Transit is continuing to limit capacity at this time on their transit services to allow for safe physical distancing and space. “Depending on which vehicle we’re running, we can typically hold 28-32 people,” Peters explains. “We initially had to reduce to six or seven to maintain that six feet of distance.” By mid-summer 2020, the small urban transportation provider was able to get passenger barriers installed, safely cutting that distance in half, and increasing capacity to 10-12, depending on the bus size. “We used the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries’ standards for measuring out cubicles,” Peters adds. “By measuring up and over the barriers, you’re still going to get to that six feet. That’s helped a little bit. But we’re starting to have some capacity issues as we’re entering into summer. We’ve unfortunately run into some circumstances where a bus has had to pass someone waiting. It’s been an interesting challenge to try to manage.” Governor Jay Inslee’s Proclamation 20-46 for high-risk workers has posed another significant hurdle to overcome: under State Executive Orders, workers who remain high risk still benefit from job protection, access to alternative work arrangements, and eligibility for unemployment insurance and other forms of paid leave. “We’ve had a significant percentage of our workforce go out under the High-Risk Proclamation,” says Peters. “We can’t increase our frequency to meet demand because we don’t have the available staff. Coincidentally, but perhaps not unexpectedly it’s a difficult time to hire. Many of those working the “really, really challenging” frontline jobs are often transit dependent. With everything going on, our services need to run. If we don’t run, the other services don’t either.” The Uber trend being much less pronounced across Walla Walla (and neighboring Umatilla County, Oregon, who’s transit providers partner with Valley Transit on iTransitNW) as compared