Citing low ridership, the Capital Area Transit System wants to eliminate a pair of routes that connect with downtown Baton Rouge—one from The Mall of Louisiana and another from O’Neal Lane—and it will hold public meetings later this month to get input on its plan.
“CATS plans to enhance service on several routes by increasing bus frequency during peak hours and, where appropriate, extending service hours. These proposed route adjustments, if approved, will allow CATS to add additional service to its highest volume routes while maintaining its overall current service levels; there will be no net reduction of service hours to the community,” says CATS CEO Bob Mirabito in a prepared statement.
If approved by the CATS board, the routes will be eliminated Dec. 6. The public hearings on the plan will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 14, and Monday, Oct. 19. Both hearings will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., with the first meeting to take place at the Bluebonnet branch library, 9200 Bluebonnet Blvd., and the second at Forest Community Park, 13900 S. Harrell’s Ferry Road.
Mirabito says route efficiency was one of five key areas of improvements discussed at a CATS board retreat held in July. The two routes proposed for elimination are among 32 total routes operated by CATS. The Mall of Louisiana to downtown route runs only on weekdays, as does the O’Neal Lane route, which offers express service from a park-and-ride lot at the AMC Theater to downtown.
As detailed by Daily Report on Monday, two of three new routes announced last year—an express route from LSU to downtown and another along Nicholson Drive—have yet to come to fruition. CATS spokeswoman Amie McNaylor says a number of factors are holding up the new routes, including the search for a new downtown hub, fleet reliability and workforce availability. She says there is no timeline for implementing the new routes.
Earlier this month, CATS was sent back to the drawing board on its efforts to establish a new downtown hub after plans to locate it at the Capitol Park Welcome Center at Third and Lafayette streets fell through. CATS has been looking for a new hub downtown since last March.
“As a government agency, it is incumbent upon CATS to be responsible stewards of the public dollars that support our service,” says Mirabito of the pending route eliminations. “Making adjustments to rebalance our resources away from underperforming routes and shifting them to higher volume routes is one way of doing this.”
—Steve Sanoski
