United Way transit project helping rural people connect with CBRM bus routes

The United Way is helping expand transit service to areas of Cape Breton Regional Municipality that don't have bus routes.

The non-profit agency previously ran a pilot program paying for taxis to take people on income assistance from rural areas to an existing bus route for medical appointments.

But executive director Lynne McCarron told Information Morning Cape Breton that it became too expensive, so the agency has launched a $1.3-million project thanks to lessons learned from the pilot project.

"We ... learned a lot of things about individual riders and things like that and how expensive it is for people to get to work, sometimes costing people upwards of $90 a day to get to work if they're using a taxi, so that's not an affordable option," she said.

So the United Way of Cape Breton has bought two buses and is putting up seven solar-powered bus shelters with Wi-Fi in outlying areas of CBRM.

McCarron said something needs to be done to help people who aren't on a bus route get into town for work or shopping.

"We have a program where we have a free bus pass, and we can't give people bus passes because they don't live on a bus route, so that doesn't make sense," she said. "We need to figure out how to do this better."

The United Way worked with CBRM, Nova Scotia Community College and Cape Breton University researcher Catherine Leviten-Reid, who has created a "social deprivation map" showing areas where things like transit, grocery stores or other services are inaccessible.

Isolation makes it difficult to fight poverty, which is one of the United Way's aims, McCarron said.

The provincially funded taxi pilot project was helpful in identifying what works and what doesn't, she said. It resulted in the creation of an app that people can use to book a taxi that picks up multiple riders, allowing them to share the cost of a trip.

The new transit project is funded with roughly $700,000 from the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, cash and in-kind contributions from CBRM and the United Way.

Two bus shelters have been built in New Waterford and Sydney Mines to help people there connect with areas serviced by Transit Cape Breton, and the United Way is working with CBRM to identify five other areas where shelters will be built this year, McCarron said.

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