“What you might see, especially if you’re not a transit user, is a bus on the road. But what we’re doing is so much more.”
The Town of Chapel Hill in collaboration with 97.9 The Hill WCHL & Chapelboro.com present “Our Town: Stories of Chapel Hill.” Each month you’ll hear from the people at the heart of your local government who are learning, serving, and working together to build a community where people thrive. This month, Keica Hargraves and Emily Powell from Chapel Hill Transit tell the story of Transit in Chapel Hill.
Photo via Chapel Hill Transit.
Emily Powell: What you see is our buses moving through town. You see transportation, you see people going somewhere, but what it means to that person is what we start our day with every day. People are not just going to class; they are going somewhere that is propelling them into their future families. They get on our bus. These are folks that really are trying to meet their daily needs through transportation, or they’re choosing to use transportation, so they get a part of their day back, they get some family time on the bus. They get an extra layer of safety when they choose our bus. So it’s really more about what we mean to this community by providing transportation. That is what we try to instill in our operators and our team members every day.
Keica Hargraves: Like she is saying, it is not just transportation, it is people relying on us to get them to where they need to go to improve their future. I have been with Chapel Hill Transit for 32 years now. I started as a bus driver. I have done a little supervising. Now I am training drivers, and I love to train drivers.
Powell: We chose you to be a training specialist, Keica, because of your skill, but also because we want that skill to be passed into our next team members.
Hargraves: Mainly when I do training, I try and get them to be confident and just keep encouraging them. Let them know that every day is going to be different. Just being aware of their surroundings and everything because everything is changing. But to just try and build their confidence up is what I’m really trying to do. Working at Transit feels like a family because, we are all close, we all look out for each other. We are all doing the same job, we all want to make it back home at night to our families.
Powell: That’s really cool to hear you say that, that you feel like it’s family because when I think of you, I think of a professional. So it’s nice to know those two things aren’t mutually exclusive because Keica shows up every day on time, bringing her best skill, her best customer service. She is looking sharp in her uniform, but when she is in the building and on that bus, she eludes family as well.
Hargraves: Yes, being on the bus and training is the love of my life right now. I drive with a smile.
Powell: I love our transit family, and I just love that we have that teamwork element and we’re all hands-on deck.
Keica Hargraves and Emily Powell
Hargraves: When we look to hire, we look for people that haven’t driven a bus before, as well as people that have been with other entities. The ones that have never driven anything big before, those are the ones that I really love to train because you’re teaching them something new, you’re trying to keep them to think about safety, and everything around them is moving really fast when you’re driving that bus.
Powell: We can train anybody to have the skill, but we are looking for people that come from the hospitality industry, the retail industry that have a lot of those people skills. It is customer service. It is just taking that extra second to look around, check your mirror, see who is running to catch your bus, and like, do you have empathy for that person? What kind of person can we recruit and can we hire and train to do that job?
I was a UNC graduate, and I felt pulled to the public sector. That is how I ended up at the Town of Chapel Hill. The community outreach manager manages all the public facing things, especially helping people learn to ride the bus. So that is everything from going into an elementary school classroom or working with employers and guiding them through the options for their employees. I feel really pulled to the work that I do there and feel like it is really important for our community and for our internal staff and making sure that my work reflects what we do in the community for our team members. So I can make sure that I am giving them my best so that our team members and operators go out into the community and give our community the best.
Hargraves: It really helps, we do feel valued because of the things that you do for us, Emily. Most of us feel like it is more than a job. It is not just moving people. It is not just transportation. It is a bit more than that. When I first came, we were not fare-free. So when it did go fare-free, more people could get to where they really needed to get to because it was fare-free.
Powell: That legacy propels us forward. So we were always cutting edge. An example is our fare-free service. But how else do we continue to be progressive? How do we continue to do more for this community? And one of the ways we are doing that is with our Bus Rapid Transit Project. Bus Rapid Transit will transform how people get through our busiest corridor, the MLK and South Columbia corridor, from Eubanks Park and Ride to Southern Village. It carries our legacy of being a progressive service in town, and it will be launching in 2030.
It is fun to see how public transit is part of a bigger picture for sustainability. It is not just about having a battery powered electric bus, which of course we have in our fleet, and all of our shuttle cars are electric vehicles, but it is about the system and the overall effect of public transit. It is healthier for all of us if there’s theoretically 60 fewer cars on the road, you put 60 people on a single vehicle instead of 60 people in a car.
Hargraves: Yeah, you do feel like it is bigger than buses.
Powell: And encouraging people to use a more active transportation. They are walking to the bus stop, or they are biking to the bus stop, or they are doing some combination to get there, so it’s an active lifestyle choice as well. It is good for the individual. So what you might see, especially if you’re not a transit user, is a bus on the road. But what we’re doing is so much more.
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