SMTD to Resume Front Door Boarding, Fare Collection, and Night Service

Front Door Boarding Resumes March 8th; Fare Collection and Night Service Resume March 15th

 Springfield, IL – The Sangamon Mass Transit District (SMTD) announced today a return to normal operations later this month.  Some policies will remain.  Masks will still be required to ride for the forseeable future, a policy SMTD implemented last March and has since been made federal law through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and SMTD will continue the new cleaning frequency as a new part of standard operations.

 Front door boarding will resume on Monday, March 8th, in preparation for the resumption of fare collection the following Monday, March 15th.  Also on March 15th, SMTD will return to regular night service hours, which means buses will run hourly from 6pm to 11pm, with the last trip departing the Transfer Center at 10pm for its final run.  

 The only exception to the return of full service will be the urbanized area service to the communities of Chatham, Riverton, Rochester, and Sherman, which is scheduled to resume with new routes this summer.

 “Nearly a year ago, the pandemic caused us to reduce service significantly, alter how we clean and maintain our fleet, and implement a number of policies and products to protect our employees and our passengers,” said SMTD Managing Director Steve Schoeffel.

 March 17, 2020, SMTD reduced schedules to what is normally run on Saturdays, reduced Night Service, suspended urbanized area service to outlying communities, and suspended the collection of fares.  SMTD also created bus cleaner positions to significantly increase the frequency and thoroughness of the disinfecting of buses, and polymer barriers in driver compartments were added to the fleet to create some physical separation between bus operators and the riding public. 

 At the pandemic’s first peak in March, ridership fell to roughly one third of normal ridership.  Since then, ridership has rebounded to approximately 75% of pre-pandemic ridership.

 “Over time, we have been able to increase schedule frequency, open our office to the public, and begin to look at getting back to pre-pandemic service,” Schoeffel said.  “Now that the local positive test rate and hospitalizations have come down substantially and the vaccine has become more-readily available, we want to do what we can to get people back to work and help re-establish some desired normalcy.”

For schedule and fare information, visit SMTD’s website at SMTD.org and visit their Facebook page or follow on Twitter.

Fall 2020 Schedule Changes

Here’s everything you need to know about the SMTD Fall schedule beginning on August 24th.

School Routes

As of this post, District 186 schools are still set to resume some form of in-person classes in August. We will be running our supplemental service routes to/from those schools as long as that remains true.

Urbanized Area Routes

The urbanized area commute routes servicing Chatham, Rochester, Sherman, and Riverton/Spaulding will continue to be suspended for the Fall schedule. We are completely redesigning the UA routes to better serve their respective communities. You’ll be hearing more about these routes soon.

Route 15 - UIS / Prairie Crossing

The construction of an overpass at Iron Bridge Road and Woodside Road is slated to begin later this year and is expected to last at least 3 years. While this will be fantastic for the Interurban Trail and those travelling between Chatham and Springfield, the construction unfortunately makes the current inbound path of our Route 15 impossible.

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Inbound segment of Route 15 (Meijer to UIS) with future overpass construction highlighted in red.

Unlike overpass construction in denser areas, we cannot detour around the affected intersection by simply changing a few blocks of the route. The outbound trip runs about 40 minutes, so turning around at Meijer and coming back the way we came would obviously take longer than 60 minutes.

Thanks to our automatic passenger counters we’re able to see how many passengers board or deboard at a given stop. For our analysis of Route 15 we grouped the stops into 10 distinct segments in order to determine which parts of the route were most useful to passengers.

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Route 15 Segment Usage

From this data we were able to determine that the majority of passengers utilized Route 15 to get either to or from UIS, Junction Circle, and Chatham Hills. Given this information and the geometry left to us by the construction on Woodside Road, we have decided that the best course of action is to continue to service the majority of passengers as best we can. Route 15 will no longer service the Westchester, Prairie Crossing, Woodside, and Toronto Road segments of the route and will instead double back along the same path it takes from UIS to Chatham Hills. This will be inconvenient for some in the areas the route no longer services, but this will preserve service for most passengers who use Route 15 while making the route bi-directional and more useful overall.

Because this new pattern is so similar to what the 114 UIS Express bus would be doing in the evening, we are cancelling the 114 and adding Route 15 to Night Service. The last Route 15 trip will leave UIS at 9:55 PM and end at Chatham Hills at 10:22 PM.

Route 1 - North 5th / Sand Hill

The inbound time check at N. Grand & 5th has been moved back 5 minutes to make it easier for the bus to get back downtown on time. Instead of :19 and :49 of the hour, Route 1 buses will leave the N. Grand & 5th Street at :14 and :44 of the hour.

Route 10 - South 11th / Stevenson

The time check at the Secretary of State office has been moved back 2 minutes to help the bus get to Big Lots earlier. Instead of :23 and :53 of the hour, Route 10 buses will leave the Secretary of State stop at :21 and :51 of the hour.

Restore SMTD Service Plan Released

Download the Restore SMTD Service Plan

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Today, SMTD is releasing our plan for returning to a full service schedule in the coming weeks and months as the state and city re-open.

• 3,000 rides per day would trigger consideration of return to full weekday, night and Saturday schedules (currently 2,400 riders per day);

• Masks will still be REQUIRED to ride;

• Chatham, Riverton, Rochester, Sherman service will not return until Fall 2020;

• School supplemental routes will not return until students return to campus;

• Fare will continue to be waived until further notice;

• Details at www.SMTD.org

In short, a ridership threshold of 3,000 passengers today will indicate the need for us to return to full weekday, night and Saturday schedules, and we anticipate that happening in the next couple of weeks. However, there is no date certain yet, as we continue to monitor ridership (approximately 2,400 passengers on Tuesday) and guidance from the county and state departments of public health and the CDC.

We anticipate no service restoration to Chatham, Riverton, Rochester and Sherman until this fall, and supplemental routes serving local high schools and UIS remain suspended until those institutions return students to their campuses. Regular routes to UIS continue to run on their emergency schedules. Passengers needing service to Chatham, Riverton, Rochester and Sherman can contact our Access Paratransit service to schedule rides in those areas until regular service is restored.

Face-coverings WILL continue to be REQUIRED into the foreseeable future, and no decision has been made yet on charging fare. So, rides will remain free for the time being. As service changes and any changes are made to fare policy, we will communicate to the public well in advance.