Medina County Public Transit releases 10 year strategic plan of recommendations to extend transit services throughout the county

MEDINA — The Medina County Public Transit's 10-year strategic plan was presented to the Medina County Commissioners during Tuesday's meeting, recommending how the agency should expand its services throughout the county such as by implementing new microtransit systems. MCPT worked with OHM Advisors over the past 14 months to create a strategic plan. Arthur Schmidt from OHM said the purpose of the plan is to advance regional mobility, add new technology for efficiency, grow ridership and more. "We were very mindful to coordinate with, again, existing transit users for the system to talk with them about how they're using the system and ways that they would like to use the system moving forward," he said. The transit currently offers six fixed routes that serve Medina County's cities and has on-demand services to residents in the rest of the county. Schmidt said OHM examined a variety of data points, such as the common transit stops to determine which areas have a high demand. Many of the common on-demand spots were just outside of the fixed routes in the cities and in places like Lodi and Seville. The recommendations are in five focus areas: marketing and branding, infrastructure and capital investments, service changes, technology improvements and agency staffing operations. A short-term service change recommendation is to establish microtransit services in Medina in mid 2023, in Brunswick in late 2023 and a fixed-route connector between Brunswick and Medina in early 2024. A microtransit system is an on-demand transit service that allows riders to book a trip and be picked up and dropped off at any destination within the service zone that spans across a large area rather than have a route with fixed stops. "These bubbles for these microtransits can start to be malleable (and) move based on where the demand is going," Schmidt said. The system was implemented in Wadsworth earlier this year as a pilot program to test the viability of the service. MCPT Director Shannon Rine said the demand for the service has been high in Wadsworth. "I anticipated double the ridership, but not this fast," he said. "I think that was the end result, not in a month." OHM also gave middle- and long-term recommendations for service change as well, such as refining services, reducing microtransit trip reservation time, extending service hours, expanding microtransit systems to other parts of the county and offering more fixed route connectors between areas. In the future, technology could be used to offer additional features like automatic passenger counting, real-time vehicle arrival data and trip planning for riders. "We have a very large service area," Jason Sudy from OHM said. "That's always going to be a challenge when you have a limited amount of vehicles in order to service that large area. We now can turn to technological advances which enable us to do things like this pilot program." OHM recommended MCPT purchase electric vehicles and chargers as a way to make capital improvements going forward. Another recommendation is to buy midsize vehicles to expand the agency's fleet. "We know that vehicles are and will become available even with the challenges that are undergoing," Sudy said. "Purchasing some of those mid-sized vehicles in the short-term is a real opportunity for us to allow the expansion of services that we're piloting right now." MCPT was encouraged to increase visibility to the public through marketing such as bus wraps and other promotional materials to educate people on its services. It was also suggested to hire more staff to meet the needs of the county. "I think you're going to see that not just with the changes that are in the immediate future, but as this transit system expands and grows over the next 10 years that you're going to be in as good or better shape than any comparable agencies that we're looking at around the state," Sudy said. Contact reporter Madisyn Woodring at (330) 721-4049 or mwoodring@medina-gazette.com.