Business View Magazine l January 2023

219 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 goals include: providing a safe and dependable transportation service for the Petersburg community, further improving awareness of PAT services to increase ridership and access to service, and increasing mobility to the Petersburg community through convenient access to employment areas, medical facilities, shopping centers, schools, and community agencies. Other goals also include the need to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service to better meet the transportation needs of the community and working to strengthen organizational processes to ensure the continuity of services moving forward. Koonce has his own list of more specific goals for the agency. “I want to conquer the underserved areas first – Stony Creek and Emporia, the Greenville area, and Prince George County,” he says. “My vision is also to be able to connect to the Williamsburg area transit and also Hampton Roads Transit. So, if someone wanted to come from Richmond to Petersburg, they could catch the transit bus to Williamsburg and on to Virginia Beach. I also would like to see some express buses to the casinos and amusement parks. Employees from other countries work at Busch Gardens, the hotels, Williamsburg, and places like that. It would be nice if people in some of the outlying counties and cities could take advantage of some of those jobs.” Koonce is also reaching out to various commercial, industrial, and educational centers to provide more transportation opportunities for them. “We have three pharmaceutical companies that are growing in Petersburg that will provide additional jobs and ridership,” he explains. “We’re in partnership with those plants to provide transportation. We’re also looking at Boars Head, Wal-Mart distribution, and Sam’s Club distribution. We’re trying to service all of these plants and companies so people will have a variety of places to work while making sure that they can go to work and come back home.” “Before the pandemic, we had a large ridership because we also have Virginia State College here,” he notes. “Now, we’re partnering with Richard PETERSBURG AREA TRANSI T Bland College to provide service. They don’t have a dedicated transit service, so they came to us about a year ago; they really want us to provide service to their students because they want them to be able to go off campus to shop or go to part-time jobs or get to doctors’ appointments. That’s in the works now and should be finalized within the next couple of months. In the end, the more ridership we have, the better we are financially. So it helps them and also helps us.” Regarding finances, PAT made a rather unusual decision in 2020, of reducing its bus fares to zero. And with the aid of state and local dollars, Koonce says he plans to keep its fixed-route service free -- as long as it can get another grant from the Department of Rail and Public Transportation. Meanwhile, this past November, the ribbon was cut on a brand new, 75,000-square-foot parking deck