Officials from the City of Hattiesburg are in the process of creating a new master plan for Hub City Transit – the city’s public transportation system – and are seeking the public’s feedback regarding how to improve that service in the city for the next five to 10 years.
Residents, visitors and students are encouraged to visit https://bit.ly/3t29oVeto take a 13-question survey that addresses topics such as access to transit, riding experience, communication of schedule and routes.
“We want to reach out to citizens and residents, and stakeholders in general, to find out what their thoughts are about transit,” said Andrew Ellard, director of the city’s Urban Development Department. “(We want to know) what kind of improvements they see that might be needed to the transit system, some services they would be interested in seeing with transit, and that will kind of help in one of the steps of shaping the future for what transit may be in Hattiesburg.
“It’ll take a look at our existing fixed-route services, to see if there are changes we need to make to that service to be more efficient to our passengers, or to pick up other pockets of passengers that we might not be getting close enough to now. It’ll also take a look at our para-transit service for those with physical disabilities, and also we have a job access program to get employees to their jobs when they might work hours or days outside of our fixed-route availability.”
The survey is part of the first phase of Hub City Transit’s master plan, which is a joint effort between the City of Hattiesburg and the Hattiesburg-Petal-Forrest-Lamar Metropolitan Planning Organization. The survey will be available through May 31, and the results will help shape the development of the master plan.
Anyone interested in the planning process is encouraged to sign up to receive updates or submit questions and comments by emailing the project team at mpo@hattiesburgms.com.
“It’s expected to be a pretty comprehensive study that would give us some short- and long-term strategies, looking at changes for the system,” Ellard said.
The public will have a chance to weigh in two more times before the master plan is finalized. In the summer, the public will be invited to review and rate different improvement options.
In the fall, once a draft plan has been completed, the public will be invited to review and make comments. The plan is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.
“Every so many years, at the very least, we should be looking at our fixed routes to see if they need to be improved in some ways,” Ellard said. “So we were at the point where we started looking at our routes again; the routes we have now, we just employed those in July of 2018, and so we’re starting to take a look now to see what might need to change there in the next year or two.
“While we’re taking a look at those routes, we just want to take the opportunity to take a deeper dive, because we may find that maybe we don’t need to invest quite so much in fixed routes, and we might be able to serve people better with more on-demand type services. It’s hard to tell just yet, until we get through this planning process, but that’s really where the value of this survey comes in. We want to hear from as many people as we can in the Hattiesburg area about what their needs are for transit.”
The survey is available in English and Spanish.
“It’s a very quick survey; it’ll only take three or four minutes for somebody to fill out and answer a few questions,” Ellard said. “We would really appreciate it.”
More information on Hub City Transit, including routes and times, can be found online at www.hubcitytransit.com.
