ABOVE: Director of Public Works Dave Ruwe (far left) and Director of Mass Transportation (far right). FILE PHOTO
Tuesday evening’s (Aug 11th) Danville City Council Public Works Committee meeting brought some good news updates. Public Transportation Director Steve White announced that their new scheduling system that they’ve been waiting for went online July 21st, and it really helps with all the around the county transportation they’ve been providing since taking over CRIS Rural Mass Transit. In fact, White says since the new system came on they’ve provided over 3,000 rides for rural residents to important items such as doctors appointments.
AUDIO: It’s called Ecolane. It plans the routes out throughout the day. We are definitely happy with it; we continue to grow daily.
The next big step, White says, is going to be expanding Danville Mass Transit’s home base to both the north and south of their current 101 North Jackson location. White says some more bus bays will need to be built, as currently some buses are being parked in the wash bay.
AUDIO: We need probably eight or nine more bays to house the buses that we have now.
Meanwhile, Director of Public Works Dave Ruwe is breathing a sigh of relief. A while back, Danville was part of about the total one-third of unlucky Illinois municipalities that didn’t receive a bid from the state program for their salt supply for this winter, due to a salt shortage. Danville had two choices; wait for another round of bids, or find someone on their own. Ruwe chose the latter, and followed the path a lot of other municipalities chose by working with a new company out of Chicago. And by doing that, the price Danville is paying per ton of salt this year dropped from a possible $160 per ton to $138.91 per ton.
Ruwe told CIMG that the one difference doing it this way was that they’d have to take all the salt at once. Ruwe says the 1800 tons being ordered for this winter, which is about average, should be able to be stored; and he believes they’ll be ready.
