United Way transit project helping rural people connect with CBRM bus routes

The United Way is helping expand transit service to areas of Cape Breton Regional Municipality that don't have bus routes.

The non-profit agency previously ran a pilot program paying for taxis to take people on income assistance from rural areas to an existing bus route for medical appointments.

But executive director Lynne McCarron told Information Morning Cape Breton that it became too expensive, so the agency has launched a $1.3-million project thanks to lessons learned from the pilot project.

"We ... learned a lot of things about individual riders and things like that and how expensive it is for people to get to work, sometimes costing people upwards of $90 a day to get to work if they're using a taxi, so that's not an affordable option," she said.

So the United Way of Cape Breton has bought two buses and is putting up seven solar-powered bus shelters with Wi-Fi in outlying areas of CBRM.