Business View Magazine | August 2020

140 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2020 powered vehicles.” Unlike some municipalities that have dedicated service lanes for its buses, Clark notes that car- friendly Chatham-Kent doesn’t require that option. “There’s very little in the way of rush-hour traffic and there’s ample parking that’s usually free,” he says. “So, we don’t require a lot of dedicated transit infrastructure like transit lanes, simply because our vehicles can move alongside the flow of vehicular traffic. With that said, we do have lots of transit-specific infrastructure around Chatham-Kent. We have shelters and a lot of them are powered by solar panels. We have our advertising transit benches. And we even have the occasional bus bay and some other transit- specific boarding infrastructure around some of our more popular points of interest.” Clark admits that the majority of Chatham- Kent residents choose to drive their own cars provided they have the means and the physical ability to do so. Even so, CKTransit’s ridership continues to grow– it currently services 340,000 riders, annually, up 23 percent since 2016. “Our ridership has been growing, mostly organically, as our population continues to age, our colleges recruit more and more international students who rely on our transit service, and also, our local economy has been changing over the past few years. We have a lot more workers working in the service industry, versus manufacturing, which impacts when we need to be delivering services, so that they can get to and from work.” As CKTransit’s ridership has grown, so has the technology that powers the system, becoming more complex and user-friendly over the years. In 2015, it converted its fare collection system to a SmartCard methodology, which provides a more convenient way for riders to pay their fare, lessens administrative cost to handle cash, and provides more reliable boarding data to assist with decision-making. “Technology is up and coming in transit, so we are also looking at a GTFS feed, so that we can have trip planners and real-time location of our vehicles,” Millson