Twin Transit Executive Director Joe Clark gave the Chehalis City Council his annual project update at the city council meeting Monday evening.
Since taking over in 2019, Clark has taken Twin Transit from 29 employees and a fleet of aging buses to 43 employees and an increasingly modern bus fleet with plans to keep modernizing.
“We’ve been able to change a few things. It’s really been the combination of having great support from this city, the city of Centralia and the county and the staff that have come on board since 2019,” Clark said.
New service routes have also been added and the Dial-A-Ride Twin Transit (DARTT) system has been expanded over the past year. DARTT started during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic by offering meal delivery service to seniors with around 150 participants. By the end of COVID-19 restrictions, there were over 800 participants in the programs and over 60,000 meals had been delivered.
Other services that seniors use DARTT for include getting to medical appointments, pharmacy trips and anything else they might need.
“We were able to find people that had no transportation, they either aged out, they had some medical condition that prevented them, their equipment didn’t run, they didn’t have gas money, whatever the case. To date, when we started this in November of 2020 we had 20 rides that month. The last four months we’ve averaged 950 rides a month,” Clark said.
Currently, Twin Transit’s public fleet includes 20 buses and 16 demand response vehicles for DARTT.
Clark stated Twin Transit has also purchased two new GILLIG electric buses and five more Dodge ProMaster vans, and plans to purchase hydrogen powered buses within the next four years as well.
Twin Transit also opened up its first e-transit station on Mellen Street. in June of 2021 and plans to open more starting with one by the Port of Chehalis, then stations off of Exits 68 and 77 on Interstate 5 and one near the airport too. These e-transit stations will feature transit stops as well as electric and hydrogen vehicle charging.
Twin Transit also recently announced a new route to Castle Rock that allows riders to link up with other transportation agencies and travel anywhere up and down the Interstate 5 corridor.
When it comes to the money, over the past year Twin Transit has generated $1.77 million in tax revenue and has generated roughly another $8 million in grants received, Clark said.
For more information about Twin Transit, the bus routes and the DARTT system, visit https://twintransit.org/.
