IA: North Liberty explores transit options following hospital opening

A little over a year ago, University of Iowa Health Care debuted its new $525.6 million, 469,060-square-foot hospital in North Liberty. The introduction of the hospital not only changed medical care in the region, public transit also has responded to get people there.

“We’re a region and where boundaries are just lines, people cross them to work and live, and so we need to be good neighbors to other people,” Angela McConville, special projects coordinator at North Liberty, said.

Cambus expanded its service area specifically for the new medical campus, while North Liberty is in the process of reimagining its public transit altogether. Johnson County is going through changes of its own with the SEATS program adapting to get residents to the facility, while the Trip Connect pilot program begins its final months.

While all transit services aim to connect Johnson County residents across the metro area, each system that connects through North Liberty has its own set of priorities and populations served.

North Liberty looks for new provider

The future of North Liberty’s transit system isn’t fully determined yet, though it will look different after the City Council voted last fall not to renew its contract with the city of Coralville for its fixed route transit service, often referred to as the “big blue bus.”

The current contract with Coralville, which costs around $100,000 per year, provides bus service from North Liberty to Coralville and Iowa City twice a day every weekday. The route picks up passengers in North Liberty around 6:30 a.m. and returns around 6 p.m. the same day.

City staff have said the bus, which costs $1 per ride, routinely averages about nine or 10 passengers per day.

The “big blue bus” service is set to end July 1, and the city is actively seeking proposals for a replacement service with the hope of signing a contract by the end of May.

The final routes and timing are yet to be finalized, but the plan is to continue service connecting North Liberty and the downtown interchange in Iowa City. McConville said the city planned to offer the service fare free, citing the success of Iowa City’s program, removal of administrative overhead and increased accessibility.

The initial proposed contract calls for a one-year trial period, with the potential to extend for a second year while the fast-growing city continues to assess its options.

“Success would just be making sure the people who are using it now can still get where they need to go. I’m really mostly concerned with the people who are there now … and just buying some time for us to think about the future and more planning. ... I will continue to work with all the other transit authorities in the area to get creative and think of ways to better serve North Liberty residents,” McConville said.

Cambus on demand

Cambus Director Mia Brunelli said that service began conversations with UIHC a year or so before the hospital actually opened about how to connect it to other UI facilities. The on-demand service allows riders to request a free ride weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to the hospital.

Brunelli said the on-demand service had been adequate in servicing the campus connection with typical peak hours for the service occurring in the morning. Cambus’s on-demand “mini buses” have space for 12-15 passengers at a time, depending on the configuration.

Brunelli said if Cambus started seeing long wait times, such as 30 or 40 minutes, or a large increase in ridership the service could adjust to adding more on-demand service or using the fixed route model.

“What on-demand does is it allows us to understand what truly is the demand that people want out of a service. What time do they want to travel and getting between different locations, rather than us trying to sort of just guess when we put out a bus schedule, we’ve got to stick to that bus schedule and then people are really adjusting their plans to the bus rather than us understanding what are the preferred travel patterns,” Brunelli said.

The North Liberty hospital is planning a $24 million buildout of 11,700 square feet of space left vacant during the original build. UIHC plans to begin building out 5,300 square feet on Level 2 this fall through next summer. Work on 6,400 square feet on Level 4 will start this winter and continue through the fall of 2027.

“That could certainly increase demand. So we’re prepared to address that. If it does put increased demands on us, we do have some options we can move quickly on, but it’s a matter of we have to see that demand before we can add more service out there. Right now, we still got plenty of capacity to take on more demand with our current service,” Brunelli said.

SEATS service

The SEATS service through Johnson County is able to provide services to the North Liberty Hospital at 7 a.m., 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. for riders using paratransit within the metro area.

Within the Johnson County metro area, SEATS paratransit service is provided as required by the Federal Transit Authority. Riders with disabilities undergo a certification process and then are free to request rides. Each ride is $2, with the exception of rides that stay within Iowa City, which are free.

“Is it the most convenient? Not really as it is, but the goal is to have some level of service up there so that people can at least get to vital appointments. I think the challenge here is we’ve got a larger urban area that includes really three small cities. ... We’d love to (expand service), and I think there’s an appetite. It takes us a while to process things but to look at how we can be better connected,” Dawn Alam, Johnson County SEATS director, said.

Each city that contracts with SEATS gets billed for actual costs to provide the service, minus any fares collected. Because multiple cities contract with the SEATS service, Alam said it helps improve service efficiencies.

“We’re a growing region, and I think (area transit agencies) work together well, but figuring out how to navigate getting people between areas is just a challenge, especially in a county like ours. We’re kind of a unique county, very rural, and we have a university, and we have really big employers,” Alam said.

Vanessa Miller contributed to this report.

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