FAIRMONT — Prairie Lakes Transit has seen several changes over the past year. From decreased ridership levels, to partnering with area food shelves, to suspending and reinstating fares, Transit Director Jeremy Monahan shares some of the challenges and decisions faced by the Faribault/Martin County Transit board.

“For the 2020 calendar year, we lost 30 percent of our ridership from 2019 to 2020,” he said.

“That’s a big chunk, but it’s everywhere. Most [transit] systems are down by at least that, if not more. Some of the commuter routes in the cities are down 80 to 90 percent.

“There’s also some concern with the way things are changing. With the openness to telecommuting, how many of these commuter routes are going to be needed when we get back to normal?”

Monahan said that while the local transit system is not where it wants to be, there has been significant recovery from low periods near the onset of the current pandemic.

Specifically, Monahan noted that ridership is down approximately 20 to 25 percent from what would be expected during a normal year. That said, he shared that a lot of the decline has to do with MRCI’s workforce building being closed down.

“We did a lot of rides for them, and the routes where we’re down are the routes in Martin County that covered MRCI’s ridership. We’ll have to see where we are going forward.

“We don’t want to cut service hours because those are really hard to get back, but I’m working with the state and the board to maybe reconfigure some of our service hours. It’s really unknown, but we’re going to be taking a really good look at it to see what we can do that might help.”

On a positive note, Monahan stated that Faribault County is fairly close to normal.

“Their routes are actually right back to near where they were pre-pandemic. January 2021 was just a little bit under January 2020, at about 90 rides less. So that’s about 10 percent. Faribault county has recovered nicely, but the caveat is that’s just January.”

Monahan noted that they don’t expect that to change very much but one factor of uncertainty has to do with the collection of fares, which were suspended for 2020.

“We did re-implement our fare collection on February 1,” he said. “We were unclear about some of the funding after February, so we figured we would have to re-implement the fares and we did.

“It turns out that MnDOT is picking up 100 percent of the cost for the rest of this calendar year, but we weren’t sure of that so we had to plan to put the fares back into place. That’s going well, and people are getting back into the swing of things.

“The general sentiment we were getting was that riders were happy and grateful to have the free rides while they were there, they are happy to pay fares again. So they appreciated it, but they’re willing to pay the fares and that’s nice.”

An exception for fare collection is given to disabled veterans, as well as providing food delivery and transportation for vaccines.

In other news the board is still looking to make some vehicle purchases originally scheduled for 2020. The purchases were delayed due to the pandemic.