CHARLESTON, W.Va.— In three weeks, the Kanawha Valley Regional Transportation Authority plan on rolling out their new bus schedules and taking away services on Sunday.

Sean Hill

In September of 2024, KRT Board Members voted to eliminate some bus routes and eliminate the Sunday service because of their ongoing efforts to save money.

Sean Hill, KRT’s Executive Director, says that they finalized the new schedules last week and their ready to be put out there.

He says getting them to the riders was important to them.

“It’s important for us that we make the effort to inform our passengers of these changes in every single way that we can,” Hill said.

When they voted to change these bus routes, their operations team went and started trying to get the new schedules and timetables worked out that would benefit their passengers.

Hill said that right now they are in the process of getting out a communication plan in order to get all the information to their passengers.

“What we’re going to do, it’s a multi-pronged approach as far as updating passengers on social media, on the buses, in print, etc. to make sure that we can say hey here are the changes, here’s the differences as far as the schedule and also here is the changes to the routes and what they look like,” Hill said. “And we’re going to do that with a visual representation through an application where you can actually click online, and it will show you the routes and the changes that have happened.”

In order to make these newer routes they looked at data that they had gotten from watching when passengers got on the bus and when passengers got off of the bus.

Hill says that whenever the bus routes are made public, they will be available to view from different formats.

“They’ll be in the building, the schedules will actually even be on the buses, well make sure that every single bus has the schedule changes on them, and they’ll also be links, where you can pull up your phone or on a computer at home,” he said. “Trying to make sure that we cover it in every single platform, we are consonant of the fact that some passengers prefer to see it in their hand as opposed to going online or looking at their phone.”

He also said that they’ll make sure that the electronic sign at the city center will display the new routes and times.

He says with the finalization; the schedules have been sent to the printers to be printed and will go up on the website soon.

And since all of that is done, he doesn’t foresee any problems occurring other than questions from the passengers.

“No, I don’t anticipate any problems with that and we’ll make sure that we have plenty of staff to answer any calls down at the Civic Center, because inevitably there will be questions and there will be complications that come up but we’ll make sure that we have enough staff on hand to answer those questions when it does roll out,” Hill said.

The new schedule and times the buses run will fully go into effect February 10.