The topic that dominated the public speakers portion of Greensboro City Council meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 4 was the I-Ride service that, without much notice, was discontinued on Dec. 31.

I-Ride was an Uber or Lyft type transportation service for the disabled run by the Greensboro Transit Agency (GTA) in 2019.

The I-Ride program started in January 2019 after GTA received a $100,000 grant to run a six-month pilot program.  After six months there was still grant money remaining, so GTA continued the service that allowed people certified to use the SCAT paratransit system to use I-Ride. Although SCAT buses do offer door-to-door service, the SCAT bus may have eight or nine other riders who are picked up or dropped off during the route, which means a ride can last as long as an hour.

I-Ride by comparison picks a person up and takes them wherever they want to go and, unlike SCAT where rides must be scheduled a day in advance, two hours notice was all that I-Ride required.

A SCAT ride costs $1.50 and for I-Ride the cost was $6.

It took a while for I-Ride to catch on, but then it became popular, and in October the City Council allocated $55,000 to pay for the service for the remainder of the year.

Ten speakers at the City Council meeting asked that the I-Ride service be brought back.  Many cited convenience and safety as reasons for reinstating the service.  Several speakers said that with I-Ride they didn’t have to worry about being late for work as they did with SCAT.

Councilmember Sharon Hightower said that the council didn’t realize how popular the program would become and that she would try to get it back in the budget.

City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson said, “Certainly Ms. Hightower has been a champion of this program, but so have many of us, the majority of the council.”

Councilmember Marikay Abuzuaiter said, “I can assure you that we have all been concerned.”

Assistant City Manager Kim Sowell said that the staff had been working on it and planned to have a proposal to request funding to reinstate the I-Ride program on the agenda for the Feb. 18 City Council meeting.

The cost of running the I-Ride program in 2019 was a total of $155,000, but the first six months of the year, the program wasn’t very popular and then it took $55,000 to cover the costs for the final two months of the year.

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