BerkshireRides Expands, Plans
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"It's been a really good month so far," said Jana Hunkler Brule, program manager, on Monday.
The new van, supported by a grant from the William J. and Margery S. Barrett Fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, will join the three purchased last summer through an $81,000 Northern Berkshire United Way grant.
The vehicles provide transportation to after-school activities, such as to the Northern Berkshire YMCA.
Thanks to the $27,000 Barrett Fund grant, the latest addition to the fleet will service the towns of Adams, Cheshire and Savoy.
"It's so new, I don't know who we're going to partner with," said Brule.
Drivers are provided by participating agencies, which also top off gas tanks and pay a monthly service fee. BerkshireRides vets the drivers' qualifications and maintains the usage schedule.
The earlier vans are used in partnership with the YMCA, the Church Outreach to Youth Center, the North Adams Public Schools and the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition.
Brule is hoping Youth Center Inc. in Adams and the Adams-Cheshire Savoy Youth Coalition, which recently received $32,000 from the Barret Fund, will hop on board. She expects the new van will arrive by the end of February.
Shuttling children from school to afternoon programs is the primary mission but the vehicles are also used to bring parents without transportation to school events. Brule said one parent needed a ride from Windsor.
Established in 2002 as Transportation Association of Northern Berkshire, BerkshireRides' mission is to supplement bus routes by taking residents where and when the buses don't go for a nominal fee. In its six-year existence, it has provided more than 200,000 rides - taking people to work, to home, to appointments, to bus stops - mostly through the use of taxis.
The limited public transportation makes it even more difficult for the disabled to get around. There's a number of programs available but they rarely coordinate and many people don't know they exist.
Brule and four other members of a Berkshire County team hope to find solutions to those problems at an Easter Seals' program - Accessible Community Transportation In Our Nation - this April in Washington.
The five-member team was one of only 20 selected from across the nation to attend Project ACTION's Mobility Planning Services Institute. The all-expenses-paid training is held once a year and teams are chosen through a competitive application process. The team's acceptance was confirmed last week.
The team was limited to five (representing specific areas) but Alison Church, transportation program manager for the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, is considered a valuable member who'll help with implementation. "She really kept us on track with the application," said Brule.
She said Anne Hayes, a disabled school library media specialist; David Daniels, assistant area director of the state Department of Mental Retardation; Kerry Sullivan, legislative aide to state Rep. William "Smitty" Pignatelli; and Kathryn Bos, special needs teacher, will attend the three-day institute.
"The idea is that we'll come away from that with a 12-month strategic action plan that we can implement," said Brule.
The team will focus on ways to remove barriers to travel for the county's disabled to allow them better access to work, social and community participation. That may include things as simple as new curb cuts; the team is also considering ways to raise awareness of existing services and how to better coordinate them.
"We're rural, so we really need to find a way to get people to the buses and come up with some other ways to get people transportation after the buses stop running," said Brule.
