Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
A state grant awarded to five towns west of Boston last spring is helping the communities develop a coordinated approach to providing public transportation. The five towns – Acton, Boxborough, Littleton, Maynard and Stow – also are receiving technical assistance from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
The state innovation grant of $185,575 is intended in part to make van service more widely available in the region, a goal developed by a volunteer on Acton’s Transportation Advisory Commission.
Acton Health Director Doug Halley said the five towns have a total of 13 transit vans, now used primarily by seniors and by teenagers who are too young to drive. Currently, each town is able to dispatch vans only two hours per day. The state grant, Halley said, will enable the five towns to set up a joint dispatch service that would operate for 10 hours each day.
On any given day, he said, each of the five towns might have at least one senior who needs to get to Emerson Hospital in Concord.
“If a regional dispatcher could coordinator things, the same van might be able to pick up the people from other towns on the way,” Halley said. “The more people you have on the ride, the less costly that van is.”
The region’s planners also see a need for shuttle van service for the increasing number of commuters who live in or very near to Boston but work in one of the five towns covered by the grant.
“The [MBTA’s commuter rail] gets reverse commuters from the city out to our sub-region,” said Littleton Town Administrator Keith Bergman, “but then we’ll need a coordinated shuttle system to connect them with employment centers in each town and with our neighboring communities and their employers.”