The Jitney service is an invaluable service for our town and MUST be maintained! It provides essential transportation for residents, it increases our property values, and its existence is an attractive reason many residents move to town.
It also costs us approximately $1.2M annually to operate. That is over 1 tax point.
WE NEED DATA! We currently know how many TRIPS the jitney took, but we don’t know how many riders took trips, or how many riders per route per time slot are taken. That needs to change. Data must inform our decision making approach. A. Institute a QR code or clicker based system per each route to obtain an accurate headcount per route per time slot. B. If certain time slots no longer are utilized at a rate that makes sense to maintain, explore consolidating routes.
Explore a nominal user fee, with rates for monthly or day riders. We need to have the data of RIDERS not TRIPS to determine what is a reasonable, affordable user fee, allowing us to maintain the service while offsetting operating costs. There are users who are not West Orange residents that utilize the jitney. That is not fair, as your tax dollars subsidize this service. That fee should be higher than whatever we end up charging our residents.
Advertise, advertise, advertise. We could have different wrap around external advertisements alongside the shuttles. We could also have cheaper and smaller interior advertising opportunities.
In the long term, explore the opportunity of purchasing and financing EV shuttles. The cost of fuel seems to continuously increase and remain uncertain. EV investment would decrease costs long term.
