Regional transportation officials want to offer more transit service to help Sahuarita and Green Valley residents get around town and to Tucson.
So the Regional Transportation Authority has scheduled two meetings for next week to hear what kinds of transit services residents would like to see in their communities.
RTA officials want to get public input before increasing local and regional transit service next fall, said Jeremy Papuga, a transportation planner with the Pima Association of Governments.
"We're going into it as a community-driven process, to hear what the community has to say," said Papuga, who's leading the RTA's short-range transportation planning team.
The RTA has budgeted about $7 million to expand the two transit services now operating in Sahuarita and Green Valley, he said.
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The regional connector service runs to Tucson and back, and a local circulator service transports people around Green Valley. Both are operated by Pima County Rural Transit.
The two services were introduced to Sahuarita and Green Valley in February 2006 as part of a three-year pilot program paid for by the Arizona Department of Transportation, he said.
Now there's another source of money: The RTA, which collects revenues from a half-cent sales tax that county voters approved in May 2006.
The tax is expected to raise some $2 billion over the 20-year RTA transportation-improvement plan; of that, $533 million will go to improving regional transportation.
The local circulator bus runs three times daily around Green Valley on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The circulator had stops in Sahuarita until county officials eliminated them in September 2006 because of a lack of riders.
In its place, the county launched a "call-and-ride" service for Sahuarita, which requires calling an hour before pickup time.
"That's actually worked quite well," said Pat McGowan, Pima County's public transportation manager.
The Green Valley circulator "is being used moderately," McGowan said.
He believes that it's not used much by Green Valley residents who have come from areas where public transit is not common.
"But it's interesting that the ones who move here from New York or Chicago, they hop on the bus and ride it everywhere," McGowan said.
"Now that we've got a history out in the area, we can find out what works, what people want," he said.
If residents would like local circulator service to return to Sahuarita, now is the time to speak out, McGowan said.
The regional connector service, on the other hand, "works very well, especially for Sahuarita people," he said.
The connector offers commuters a ride to the Laos Transit Center in Downtown Tucson, where passengers can transfer to other buses bound for elsewhere in the city.
That seems to work well for Sahuarita residents who work at Raytheon and Bombardier, two big employers just south of Tucson International Airport.
The midsize buses, which run twice every weekday morning, and twice on weekday afternoons, give commuters a break from city traffic — and ever-more-expensive gasoline costs.
"I think it's a great thing," McGowan said.
If you go
Two meetings to encourage public input on improved transit service for the Sahuarita-Green Valley area will be held on Tuesday.
The first will be 9-10:30 a.m. at the Green Valley Community Coordinating Council office, 101-14B S. La Cañada Drive, Green Valley Mall.
The second will be 5-7 p.m. at the Anamax Park Recreation Center, 17501 Camino de las Quintas, Sahuarita.
Call Sheila Storm, Regional Transportation Authority spokeswoman, at 792-1093 for more information.
To find out more
For more information on Pima County Rural Transit's local circulator and regional connector bus service, call 740-6403 or go online to www.dot.pima.gov/transsys/bus and click on the links near the bottom of the page.
