Chatham-Kent is putting provincial money to good use in order to improve public transit within the municipality.
The province recently announced funding to enhance and expand transit for 105 municipalities.
Chatham-Kent is one of the municipalities chosen and has received $952,316.
However, Director of Engineering and Transportation Adam Sullo says the municipality has already been working on transit enhancements. Sullo says the municipality knew they were getting gas tax funding earlier in the year and started working on projects in the summer. He adds the province only recently made the official announcement because agreements took longer than expected.
"We submit data on our ridership for transit and then we receive what's called gas tax funding," he says. "We receive a certain amount of funding based on our ridership from the previous year... The only requirement with that gas tax funding is, it has to be spent on transit specifically."
Sullo says the improvements range from better transit shelters to installing new sensors for buses at intersections so that they have a longer green light.
In addition, Sullo says they were able to make road and sidewalk improvements to make route times and create a safe path to walk for transit users.
"We were thinking of improvements to our road network overall so we were really happy to do something like the right turn lane at McFarland [and St. Clair], which was able to help," he says. "It's a benefit to transit riders to improve their experience, and to improve the timing of the bus, but I think overall it's a positive thing."
"All the improvements we made this year were made -- pretty much 100% with provincial subsidies or grants," he adds.
Originally, the municipality had until March 2018 to use the provincial gas tax funds, but Sullo says because agreements took longer than anticipated, that date has been extended by a few of months.
