Forsyth County 'microtransit' program provides free work-related rides to residents

For some Forsyth County residents, getting to work can be an hours-long process. Gaps in the public transportation system can leave carless residents who work outside of Winston-Salem without many options. The problem inspired Forsyth Rides, a county-sponsored project that offers employment-related transportation to residents.

It’s facilitated in part by Support Systems of Forsyth County, a private transit service co-owned by Courtney James. From her office at S.G. Atkins Community Development Corporation, James says she’s able to manage and track rides in real time.

“See like, these people are in transit,” she says, pointing to her computer screen. “I know where they are. I know how fast they're going.” 

Clients prearrange travel to and from work and James dispatches drivers to them. The service is entirely free to riders. And James says that’s not the only thing that sets it apart from Uber or Lyft.

“We absolutely want to know, is your car down? Is it an insurance payment problem? Do you have tickets?,” she says. “Because there are a lot of programs around the city and county that will support you and help you get back into, you know, the driver's seat.”

The program was designed in part to provide exactly this kind of individualized service. It was the brainchild of Andrea Sheetz, Workforce and Economic Development Analyst with Forsyth County. She says the idea came to her during her work visiting employers.

“I go out to these big manufacturing plants that are on the north side of the county that are far away from downtown Winston,” she says. “And those are great jobs that don't need a college degree, but the bus doesn't go out there.”

She’d heard about so-called microtransit programs in other North Carolina cities and knew the county had a state transportation grant that could be used to support something similar. Soon, she was opening applications for the program. 

They were quickly inundated, receiving so many that they had to close the process early. Sheetz and her staff then spent weeks sifting through the pages.

“Reading what people are facing in their day to day life, they're doing the hard thing,” she says. “We have some people who are facing domestic violence, who are single parents of multiple children, and they're just trying to get to work and provide for their families.”

Sheetz says it was tough to decide which clients to take, but they developed a needs-based system to help determine which applications to prioritize. As the program got underway, Sheetz says they learned more about the barriers people face when it comes to accessing reliable transportation. 

Sheetz says she and her staff began directing clients to resources outside of her department to help, like financial literacy or housing programs. 

“Whether it's their budget, whether it's that they just don't have a driver's license, or childcare or a job closer to home,” she says. “From my office's role in the county, we have access to a lot of that, and we can connect a lot of those dots that people just don't know are out there.”

Sheetz says budget limitations mean they’re only able to take a handful of clients each quarter. Brennon Fuqua, with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, says that’s one of the drawbacks of programs like these.

“It's more expensive to operate. You're talking about individual rides that can be 20 minutes, or 30 minutes long. And they all have rideshare aspects, but you're still talking about only moving a couple of people instead of like your fixed route buses that have the ability to move, but 20 to 40 people at a time.”

But he says that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for microtransit in the state’s public transportation infrastructure. He says fixed route buses are great for population dense areas, but:

“Not everybody lives in those specific areas,” he says. “So microtransit is a great layered option to get somebody that last five miles or 10 miles into that fixed route system.”

Fuqua has worked with several cities to establish similar microtransit projects. He says they are now working with the state and federal governments to figure out how to fund these programs in more sustainable ways, so that cities aren’t constantly looking for new grants. 

“There's over a million people in the state that don't have access to single occupancy vehicles,” he says. “And they've got to still move from place to place. So we want as many different accessible routes as possible there.”

NCDOT is working with 11 different communities this year to establish microtransit programs under a new state grant. Forsyth County’s program is already funded through the next fiscal year – the new cohort starts July 1.