Coalition highlights transportation Initiatives
The OBKY Coalition for Workforce Diversity hosted its meeting Thursday at the Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce, where guest speaker Maria Kemplin, the project director of the transportation initiative, spoke about initiatives to help improve public transportation.
According to Kemplin, the Transportation Initiative is a project of the University of Kentucky’s Human Development Institute, supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Council on Developmental Disabilities.
“The Transportation Initiative works to provide education, information and technical assistance on accessible transportation for Kentuckians with a disability,” Kemplin said.
The mission with the initiative is to help provide those with disabilities easy access to transportation, Kemplin added.
“I think transportation is probably the number one barrier to people with disabilities,” Kemplin said. “Having a job, or getting to medical appointments, or participating in the community, volunteering, getting to a community event, or voting. All of those things require transportation, and if you have a physical disability, or a developmental disability, or an intellectual disability, or maybe you’re just aging, and you’re no longer driving independently; all of those things are barriers that keep people from being able to do what they need to do.”
Some communities offer various different services, with a city like Owensboro having a public transit route, with people living in the county being unable to take advantage of public transportation, Kemplin said.
“That’s why it’s really important, with the current employment crisis and finding enough talented employees to fill jobs, that we have good public transit options so people can enter the workforce,” Kemplin said.
Community action agencies help to address these issues and work to resolve them, providing transportation services. One example of a county that does this would be Montgomery County. Its public transportation is operated by Gateway Community Action Agency, providing county-wide service for $1 a trip, Kemplin said.
“They have a fantastic service, but each community action service gets to decide what their community needs,” Kemplin said. “In some communities, they’re dealing with things like flooding, like in eastern Kentucky, so they may use less of their budget for transportation. It really depends on the community’s needs.”
Kemplin said that such a program can help Daviess County if it is currently experiencing difficulties with recruiting and retaining employees, in various fields.
“A lot of businesses in cities are experiencing a crisis with finding employees,” Kemplin said. “Expanding public transit can open up opportunities for people to take a job, or to work more hours, because they have more transportation available to them.”
Information on transportation options from the Transportation Initiative can be found at https://transportation.hdiuky.org.
The Transportation Initiative also has social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram to educate people about transportation options across Kentucky, under the name Transportation.Initiative.
A master list of public transit providers by county can be found at https://transportation.ky.gov/TransportationDelivery.
“I’d like to recommend that the community look at how an investment in public transit can pay off in terms of increased revenue for businesses and being able to recruit and retain employees,” Kemplin said. “[The Kentucky Public Transit Association] has some data on how investing one dollar in public transit pays off exponentially in the local economy.”