Growing transit

In recent years several cities outside Austin have considered developing transit plans and adding fixed-route bus systems, said Sam Sargent, community involvement coordinator for Capital Metro, the Austin-based transit authority that serves as an intermediary for federal mass-transit funding for cities within the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan statistical area, including Georgetown.

Round Rock will launch its own fixed-route system Aug. 21. Sargent said Capital Metro has also talked with the city of Hutto regarding a fixed-route bus system there.

Capital Metro has worked on similar initiatives with city officials in Pflugerville and Buda, he said.

In Georgetown the GoGeo system, which includes fixed-route service and paratransit—which serves riders with disabilities or special needs—will replace curb-to-curb service operated in the city by the Capital Area Rural Transportation System. The system has about 2,800 subscribers in the Georgetown area, according to the city. 

In 2010 when the U.S. Census Bureau placed Georgetown within the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan statistical area, the city gained the ability to access federal funding through Capital Metro for public transit, but it also lost CARTS service, as the demand-based system is meant to serve rural areas that are not part of an urbanized core, said Ed Polasek, transportation planning coordinator for Georgetown Utility Systems and a GoGeo development leader.

Following the 2010 census change, Georgetown was able to work out an interim arrangement with the state and Capital Metro to continue CARTS service in the city with an understanding among the partner agencies that Georgetown would eventually develop its own bus system, Polasek said.

“We were clinging on with every last fingernail to keep that service,” Polasek said. “I understand that there are going to be some people that might be upset they lose that, but that’s the issue we face in becoming an urbanized area.”

Within GoGeo’s funding arrangement, Capital Metro serves as an intermediary for federal money to go toward the system, and CARTS serves as a contracted service provider, Polasek said.

Developing GoGeo

Capital Metro consultants who developed the GoGeo bus routes sought to provide service to areas of the city that would likely have the most potential ridership based on 2010 Census data, Polasek said.

Planned expansions and upgrades to several of Georgetown’s major roadways were also constraining factors in planning GoGeo routes, Polasek said. Planners tried to keep route crossings across I-35 to a minimum so as to avoid negatively affecting travel times, he said. GoGeo’s service map has two crossings over the freeway.

“The thing we’ve been trying to tell people is [that] as service grows, as our population grows, as our federal funding remains consistent or grows, we’ll be able to expand into additional routes and connector routes like Capital Metro does in Austin,” he said.

Ross said performance benchmarks built into the GoGeo plan will allow the city to reassess how the system operates and to which sections of Georgetown buses provide service. Depending on the results of ridership assessments, the routes can be changed, he said.

The evaluation measures, which will be handled by Capital Metro, will help officials in determining if the bus system’s stops are placed properly and functioning to their highest levels, Polasek said.

“If we’re not hitting performance measures, we have to take it back to [City Council] and let them know,” Polasek said.

Community partners

GoGeo’s costs will be split among federal funds through Capital Metro, local funding through Georgetown City Council and a $600,000 grant from the Georgetown Health Foundation, which will be paid out over the first three years of the service. 

Sargent said the involvement of a nonprofit benefactor to GoGeo “was very unique and really let this system have more service than it would have had otherwise without that money.”

The foundation’s Southeast Georgetown Community Needs Assessment, which was commissioned in 2015 with The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at The University of Texas, was the impetus for the foundation’s involvement in GoGeo, said Suzy Pukys, the foundation’s vice president of strategic philanthropy.

The assessment identified 10 critical needs for Southeast Georgetown residents, but the No. 1 need was transportation, Pukys said.

“While that didn’t come as a surprise to us, it really gave us an opportunity to talk publicly about the need,” Pukys said.

Regarding transportation, several community members who participated in the assessment said they faced difficulty because they do not have their own vehicles to travel to work, school, a doctor or other destinations in town, she said.

“It was just such an essential quality-of-life issue that we went to the city and started conversation about how we might provide support to any sort of public transit effort that they were making,” Pukys said.