Virginia Tech officials are trying to gauge the interest students and employees might have in riding a bus to Lynchburg so they could board an Amtrak passenger train to Washington and cities north of there.
Both Roanoke and the state’s Department of Rail and Public Transportation are studying whether there are enough potential train passengers in that part of Virginia to justify a bus connection to Lynchburg’s train station.
If it is launched, the service would stop in Bedford to pick up passengers there, said Carl Palmer, general manager of Roanoke’s Valley Metro bus service.
Valley Metro already runs 13 round trips per day to Blacksburg on a route it calls the Smart Way bus.
“They are looking into the possibility of starting a public transit link from the New River Valley and Roanoke to the Lynchburg Amtrak station because there is obviously a missing link there,” said Hilary West, Virginia Tech’s transportation spokeswoman. “We don’t have a good way to get to Amtrak,” she said.
Rex Hammond, president of the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce, said he plans to attend a meeting later this month with rail proponents in Bristol and in Tennessee to “talk about the Tennessee leg of our strategy.”
“There is some encouraging work being done in Roanoke and Blacksburg,” Hammond said. “We are halfway home if we can get this to Roanoke and Blacksburg.”
Joyce Waugh, president of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, said studies already have gathered reliable numbers that show several people who board the Amtrak trains in Lynchburg get there by driving from Roanoke.
“I know a significant number of people, more than just anecdotally, come from the Roanoke region” to ride Amtrak in Lynchburg, Waugh said.
Earlier this year, regional planners at the Roanoke-Alleghany Regional Commission estimated that it would cost $291,000 a year to operate a Roanoke-to-Lynchburg bus.
Palmer said Valley Metro has hired a consultant to refine the ridership estimates produced by the regional commission, which spokesman Jeremy Holmes said were “admittedly unscientific.”
Palmer said some Roanoke Valley governments plan to apply for a state grant that would fund 85 percent of the operating cost.
The Department of Rail and Public Transportation in Richmond is expected to produce its own study by Dec. 31.
DRPT will assess “the anticipated ridership and funding required to support a pilot project of daily bus connector service from the Roanoke Valley to the Kemper Street Station in Lynchburg,” according to a directive from the General Assembly.
The DRPT study was requested by the General Assembly in its last session, with an eye toward providing a bus connection for the remaining two years of the three-year pilot project that brought Amtrak’s Northeast Regional train service to Lynchburg.
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