In 2015, the Town adopted the 2015-2025 Strategic Plan. An initiative identified as part of the plan is objective 1.7.1 Feed County Bus System through Ridesharing. The goal of this initiative is to convert the Town's Moover fixed route circulator service to a full on-demand ridesharing transportation service. Currently, the Town has an agreement with Freebee to provide on-demand ridesharing services, which the Town wants to expand to replace the Moover bus service.
In order to fund this expansion, the Town worked closely with Citizen's Independent Transportation Trust (CITT) and the Miami-Dade County Commissioners (BCC) to amend the County ordinance related to the People's Transportation Plan (PTP) to allow special tax revenues to be used toward on-demand transportation services. The PTP ordinance was amended by the BCC in May of 2018 and the use of PTP dollars for on-demand services became effective in November 2018.
In moving forward with implementing Strategic Plan initiative 1.7.1, the Town held a public meeting on Monday, January 28th to inform the community about the propose changes to the Moover service and to solicit feedback from the community regarding these changes.
To recap the public meeting, below is a summary of the proposed changes to the Moover bus service:
- The Town will convert the Moover fixed circulator route to a complete on-demand transportation service, which will be provided by our current provider Freebee.
- The Freebee service hours will be expanded to cover similar hours as the Moover bus service. The Freebee service will run Monday to Friday from 6:30 am to 7:00 pm and on Sunday's from 10 am to 2:00 pm.
- The Town will be adding a third vehicle to the Freebee fleet. This new vehicle is an all electric (10) passenger van, which will allow the Town to expand the Freebee service area to cover the whole Town. Currently, some sections of the Town are not serviced by Freebee, since the smaller (5) passenger vehicles are restricted to roads with speed limits of 35 mph or less.
- The Town anticipates implementing these changes by April 2019 and funding for the changes was incorporated in the FY 2018-2019 budget cycle.
Following the public meeting, the next step for the Town is terminate the existing Interlocal Agreement between the Town and the County for the Provision of Public Transportation. Per section 8.5 of the Interlocal Agreement, either party may terminate the agreement upon sixty (60) days written notice to the other party. Thus, it is recommended that the Town Council authorize the Town Manager to terminate said agreement, in order to take the steps necessary to implement Strategic Plan initiative 1.7.1.