WELLINGTON COUNTY – Big changes could be coming to RIDE WELL to accommodate increasing demand and future funding challenges.
While the county previously expected to receive $154,943 from the Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) between January 2024 and March 2025 to complete the RIDE WELL pilot project, a report by Dillon Consulting coming to the Economic Development Committee later this week said an additional $227,196 has been secured.
Bringing the total up to $382,139, this funding will support accommodating increased service rates, addressing future expansions in service hours and using a consulting company to assess service performance and aid long-term planning to attract more riders to the service.
As this funding must be used before the pilot project finishes, it's recommended council identify the cost-benefit of implementing a dedicated service in Centre Wellington and work with the municipality to identify a funding strategy for the service and reduce the cost to the county to find "long-term sustainable solutions."
In the short term, the report recommends implementing a zone structure with dedicated vehicles, adding a vehicle to increase the availability for cross-zone trips, increasing the travel times for cross-boundary trips, Uber integration and call centre support and IVR functionality.
Any remaining grant funding will be used to increase service hours to include evening and/or weekend service.
Going forward, the report said the county needs to consider whether to prioritize providing accessible and direct trips to all residents or provide a service where there is the potential for high demand but requires passengers to travel to a fixed route stop.
Keeping this in mind, the report presents three options to improve ridership:
- Increase the number of service hours and continue to operate a door-to-door service across the entire county
- Change the focus of the service to the dense communities while providing a similar or lower level of service in the rural areas
- Change the service model to a fixed route service focused on the inter-community connections between the densest communities in the county
These recommendations were based on the results of a community engagement survey that found RIDE WELL's on-time performance and average wait times have worsened, increasing both no-show and abandoned trips and concluded the on-demand model will not help resolve this as demand grows.
According to the survey, only 58 per cent of residents surveyed were familiar with RIDE WELL and 2.86 per cent said they currently rely on public transit to get around the community.
Peak travel times occur between 6:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. with nearly 50 per cent of trips starting or ending in Fergus and 34 to 42 per cent of trips having an origin or destination within Guelph, Guelph/Eramosa and Elora.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
