Business View Magazine | March 2020

146 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 that have been distributed to those residents, who are some of our most vulnerable, and it’s 100-percent free to them. It’s really quite groundbreaking and not something that we learned from other transit agencies and copied. And it’s definitely contributing to some of our increased ridership, as well.” For residents who are not clients of the province through that program, Halifax Transit has expanded its own low-income transit pass program. “It allows residents to have passes at half price,” Hughes continues. “Halifax Regional Council has increased the program limit from a thousand to two thousand passes a year. We’ve also worked with our colleagues in Recreation Services so that the pass is consolidated with some of their programs for folks with low income, so they can now apply once through the city and be eligible for the recreation, and the tax relief, and the transit programs. In addition, we’ve been working on our E-Pass program, which are annual employer passes you can get from your workplace and comes as a payroll deduction. We’ve been promoting it, and our E-Passes were up 11 percent, last year.” In addition, a recent pilot program allows any youth under age 12 to ride free, and Halifax has had passes for its university and college students in place, for years. While making it less expensive for residents to take the bus, Halifax Transit also has made it easier for them to find buses and bus schedules via their smart phones and other connected devices. “We don’t have our own app, but we push out real-time data in a publicly- accessible format: GTFS, or General Transit Feed Specifications,” Reage explains. “That’s a standardized format. Google picks it up and you can use Google Transit to see real-time stop arrivals and things like that. And there’s a whole array of other apps that can pick up that data. So, it’s really the best of both worlds; it allows us to get that information out to customers, but we don’t have to get into the realm of developing and maintaining an app. The various app companies out there are way more nimble than