The Central Ohio Transit Authority will start using funds this year to increase the frequency of buses, extend late night hours to midnight and explore more transit improvements.
COTA said in a news release Thursday it will launch more service improvements starting on Monday. The changes include increased frequency on CMAX along Cleveland Avenue and downtown Columbus and preparing to extend late night bus hours to midnight starting sometime later this year between May and September.
"(Extending late night hours) will be a really great opportunity for the second and third shift workers in our community to have access to our transit system the way they really need to be. And we see once we're able to do that, I'm seeing a nice bump in our ridership as well," COTA spokesman Jeff Pullin said.
Pullin said this happening depends on how quickly they can bring on the 35 new bus operators COTA plans to hire this year.
Sometime in the next five years, COTA also plans to add 24-hour service to some of the city's higher frequency lines.
COTA is also looking into bringing back a version of the old CBus downtown circulator. The CBus circulator was a free-to-ride downtown bus route that ran from the Brewery District to the Short North. That service ended during the pandemic, but COTA hopes to bring back the concept.
Pullin says COTA wants to study how something like the CBus line needs to change from what it was before COVID.
"We do see value in having a circulator downtown, but we want to make sure that we're doing it more than just hitting the High Street locations. There might be some better locations that we need to be hitting as well that are east and west of downtown," Pullin said.
Pullin says a new circulator line could be complimentary to the bus rapid transit route that connect into downtown. Construction is planned to start on the BRT routes later this year.
Three of the five BRT routes have had some form of planning already. One would go from downtown Columbus to the far east side on East Main Street; another would go from downtown Columbus to the far west side on West Broad Street; and the third would go towards Dublin on a northwestern route from downtown Columbus.
Funding for a lot of these improvements are coming from COTA's LinkUs sales tax levy, which was passed by voters in central Ohio this November.
