Passengers using the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority’s new bus hub at Cherry and Huron streets when it opens next month will have restrooms at their disposal, the ability to buy bus passes on-site, and television monitors with information about their buses.
For at least a few weeks, though, they’ll be using temporary benches until the furniture TARTA has ordered for the refurbished former Goodwill Building arrives, Amy Mohr, the transit authority’s marketing director, said during a news media tour of the facility Wednesday.
The permanent furnishings are due in sometime in September, “but we have furniture that we’re going to put in in the meantime — we’ve got the benches in the basement,” she said.
TARTA has scheduled a public open house at the transit center for Aug. 7, with the facility scheduled to open for regular bus operations the following Monday.
What was Goodwill’s retail floor has been remodeled as a waiting room with a service counter, security booth, and restrooms. Francis Frey, the TARTA board of trustees’ vice president, reiterated Wednesday that all three features had long been desired by local transit riders.
“It should be a benefit to all of the participants,” Mr. Frey said, noting that downtown merchants should get fewer requests in the future from bus riders wanting to use their restrooms.
Outside the remodeled storefront, the city of Toledo and its contractors have finished resurfacing Cherry Street past the station site and converting Huron Street to two-way traffic between Cherry and Adams streets.
As part of Cherry’s resurfacing, its eastbound right lane has been truncated just west of Erie Street. That pavement now becomes a right-turn lane approaching Huron, while between Huron and Superior streets it is now marked as a bus lane.
Bus line-ups now staged on Jackson Street between Erie and Summit streets will be moved to that piece of Cherry as well as Huron between Orange Street and Cherry once the transit center opens.
Still to be done by TARTA is expansion of sidewalks on the Huron side of the building to facilitate bus boarding, a project for which the TARTA board recently awarded a $64,854 contract to Scott’s Quality Concrete, Inc., of Sylvania. That work has yet to start, but Ms. Mohr said she believed it would be done in time for the Aug. 12 service startup.
Overall, TARTA has spent more than $640,000 on the transit-center project, which agency officials say has been funded entirely with state and federal grants. The city’s street improvements nearby provided a local match for those grants.
Various bus routes will still stop at other locations in and around downtown Toledo, but the transit center’s opening will end the practice, in place since the early 1980s, of having all downtown routes circulate through a loop surrounding nine blocks of Toledo’s central business district.
First Published July 25, 2019, 12:20 a.m.
