It will be summer before a transit master plan goes to Asheville City Council for review, but on April 2, consultants helping to create the plan released some of their preliminary suggestions.
Click here to see the four-page handout on the Xpress Files.
The changes are apparently intended to focus more energy on several major transit corridors while pulling out of areas with less rider demand. That means increasing the frequency of runs to every 30 minutes for a few routes and adding Sunday service where rider traffic is heavy. Meanwhile, other routes may lose Saturday service and some apartment complexes along the way could be cut from the routes.
Another route may be added that skips downtown altogether and provides direct access from west to east Asheville.
None of these changes are set in stone, said Robert Bush, Transit Principal for HDR Inc., the Raleigh-based consultant firm, and last week’s gathering netted even more responses from the public attending the meeting, many of whom said they were frequent bus riders. The effort was the latest in a series of open houses directed at soliciting public input on the master plan.
HDR will take the input collected at that meeting and make further adjustments before a final draft is made.
— Brian Postelle, staff writer
