Steve Bland is the head of WeGo Public Transit. Officially, he is the CEO for the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) of Middle Tennessee, but both of those authorities are doing business under the brand of “WeGo Public Transit.”
Bland, who has been leading WeGo since August 2014, shared that he’s always known he wanted to work in transportation.
“I grew up in northern New Jersey, the New York City area,” he said. “My earliest recollections of childhood were my parents taking me into New York City riding the subway. Whatever we were going to do, whether it was to see a ball game or the circus or whatever, the highlight of my trip was always riding the subway.”
In November, Nashvillians voted for a half-penny sales tax surcharge that created a dedicated funding source for a transportation improvement program called Choose How You Move. While it includes improvements to sidewalks, signals, and safety, a huge focus is on public transit improvements — and Bland and his team have been busy working on it.
What are the first priorities under Choose How You Move?
We’re working on two focus areas. One, are things that we can deliver pretty quickly so people see proof of concept of what we’re trying to do. They’re shorter-term goals.
The other is starting the groundwork for projects we know take a long time to develop. But if you don’t start them early that means you just push things out further and eventually you hit the wall on service enhancements you can make. On those, you’ll see a lot of money identified for things that will happen seven or eight years [down the road].
On the shorter-term goals, we actually just recently completed public engagement in our Title VI process for our Choose How You Move. The MTA Board approved those service changes that include improvements for Access on Demand, which is a door-to-door system for persons with disabilities. We’ve had requests from our customers for quite some time to expand that to weekends. It had only been Monday through Friday. So that’s one of the service enhancements that’s funded through Choose How You Move that will go into effect on May 31.
If you’re familiar with our WeGo Link* program, which is the First Mile/Last Mile connector. We’ll be adding two WeGo Links in June, one is the Broadmoor area of East Nashville, where we had quite a bit of demand. The other is in the Elm Hill Pike area in Donelson. [Moving forward] you’ll see more WeGo Link zones added a couple times a year.
For longer-term projects that we’re starting to fund yearly development on: One is the second Downtown Hub South of Broadway. We were allocated funding to start the development and planning for that as well as a new additional bus operations and maintenance facility. When we do all the service improvements contained in Choose How You Move, the fleet will increase by about 100 buses and vans. We just don’t have enough room to maintain or operate all that. Those facilities take a long time to come on board.
*WeGo Links is explained at https://www.wegotransit.com/assets/1/6/2025-04_WeGo_Link_FAQ.pdf
Where in SoBro is the second Downtown Hub going to be?
It’s those vacant lots right across from the Greyhound Bus station. Actually, they’re owned right now by the Convention Authority, and they bought them back in 2018 when the last [transit] referendum was going through. They’re using them for staging right now. But the intent was always to work with us to build a southern center.
Which of these priorities have already started?
This first round of the Access on Demand and WeGo Link zones are planned before July. The first rounds of fixed-route improvements will start by July. There will be another round of improvements in January, where we’ll likely go to the public for comment in August or September.
In addition to just getting started on the SoBro Hub, we are awarding a design contract for the Donelson Transit Center. That will be located at the Donelson rail station. We’re also working with Metro and Councilmember Joy Styles on a Transit Center in Antioch in conjunction with the Global Mall redevelopment down there.
Every one of [our new transit centers] will reorient and improve the services in the area. They will be designed based on the neighborhood that they’re in and what people are interested in seeing.
With the Dr. Ernest Rip Patton, Jr. Transit Center in North Nashville we did things like improve the frequency on the 22 Bordeaux bus; we extended the Metro Center bus to serve there; and we created the new Trinity crosstown line. Now there are seven different routes that converge on that location. We improved the frequency on the 75 Midtown, the 77 Thompson/Wedgewood Connector, and as a result of all that, beyond the facility itself, we really improved connections from different neighborhoods in the city.
Now you can get from North Nashville to East Nashville without going Downtown. You can get from North Nashville into the Metro Center offices without going Downtown. You can get to the Vanderbilt area or South Nashville without going Downtown. The overall, long-term goal – once we develop this network of centers and improve the services cross-town with better frequency – is that every trip does not have to go through WeGo Central Downtown.
In North Nashville, we opened that building last year, and within six months we saw a 36-percent increase in ridership on the routes that serve the North Nashville Transit Center. That’s part of the goal, to make the system more convenient, more usable for more people, and make the travel time shorter. And if you’re in the North Nashville neighborhood – obviously the facility is nice – but with the service improvements, we calculated that the number of jobs that someone in that neighborhood could reach within an average of a 45-minute bus ride expanded by over 100,000.
So, a lot of the vision of this is to expand the range of opportunities that people have by offering one-seat rides, shorter rides and more frequent services.
How have the federal spending cuts affected your budget and your plans under Choose How You Move?
[As of this publication date], we have not seen any reduction or disruption in our federal funding. We still have grants in the pipeline. We’ve had grants recently awarded; that includes two discretionary grant awards, one of the Antioch Transit Center and one for the Donelson Transit Center.
We were intentionally conservative in Choose How You Move about what percentage of federal money would be involved in that. Most of the federal money that we targeted beyond our regular formula money, which we haven’t seen any impediment to, is through a program called Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant program. That’s for the all-access corridors, and we’re not projecting to need any of those funds until about 2031 and 2032. So, a lot of that we’ll be paying close attention to. The surface transportation bill comes up for reauthorization, I think it’s at the end of next year, and it usually takes them a year or two to work through that. So that’s something we’ll be paying attention to as we get into mid to late 2026 as they go into reauthorization.
WeGo has done a years-long safety study and has now a plan in place to improve safety. What are the new measures?
We’ve always enjoyed a collaborative arrangement with Metro Nashville Police. But they have appointed a specific transit liaison. His name is Capt. Brian Williams, and the goal is to have an enhanced transit security presence. We’re looking at staffing up a transit ambassador program. A lot of larger cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York are doing it. It’s a sort of bridging that social services need. [Our intent is to have] people in the transit system who understand the social services networks. So, when they see someone in distress, maybe they can get them to the homeless division or mental health resources or to substance abuse resources, so that we’re helping out individuals and simultaneously improving that perception of security.
One of the 11 foundational projects that the Mayor announced in the Choose How You Move implementation includes a Low-income Fare Subsidy Program. What is it?
I think it’s going to be a huge benefit. I mean, you know, we worked with you all closely on the Connector Card program and the Adverse Weather Card program. So right now, we’re ironing out what I would call the administrative details of the program with Metro Finance and the Mayor’s Office.
I think what you’ll expect to see within the next month is a convening of a number of the social service agencies and the advocacy organizations to talk about things like eligibility. What format does that take? How do you how do you demonstrate you’re eligible? Is that all done through WeGo? Could you go to the homelessness division to sign up? Could you go to WIC and sign up? (WIC is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children)
I would expect that basically once you’re registered for the program, then you’ll essentially just have access to a QuickTicket account that gives you free transit benefits. I can’t envision any reason why that wouldn’t be up and running with people registering and getting free transportation this calendar year.
Is there a limit on the number of free tickets?
A lot of the details will come through the conversation with the agencies and the advocates to say how it should be designed. The overall goal of the program is, if you need it, a) it’s pretty easy to get, and b) [recipients] should not be constrained. Let me put it to you this way, lack of access to a bus pass should not be a reason that you don’t take a trip.
That’s the target of the program. From our perspective, we want to make it easy. We don’t want our operators to have a true burden. We don’t want it to be difficult for customers to access. We think it will be a game changer in terms of opening up [transit]. And you know how important the Connector Card* was for people in that user base to be able to access services or just get to and from where they need to go to. We’re hoping that this expands that availability to a whole lot of other people in the community that need it.
I will be a) surprised and b) extremely disappointed if people don’t have that card in their hands by the end of the calendar year.
*The Connector Card program was a partnership created between the Metro Homeless Impact Division and WeGo to serve up to 500 people experiencing chronic homelessness with access to an annual bus pass as they transitioned from homelessness to housing.
Where do you think Nashville will be in five years in terms of public transit?
I would say certainly in a better position than we are now, but not nearly as far as we need to be or expect to be. I would think we’ll certainly have a lot more service. You’ll see more routes and more frequency on routes. I would expect we will have on our major routes 24-hour operations by then and several of the transit centers open.
But the thing that won’t be done yet, the All-Access Corridors*. One of the things in the plan is upgrading another 200 stops, basically doubling the number of sheltered stops we have, with accompanying pedestrian infrastructure. We expect to go from delivering about 20 of those a year to 40 or 50 a year. So, you’ll see a lot more stop improvements.
NDOT (Nashville Department of Transportation) is working on traffic signals and sidewalks, and a lot of the Vision Zero types of things like improved crossings, and we work really closely with them to integrate those with busy stops. But again, North Nashville is a good example where improving the frequency, improving the connections, and improving span of service, makes a real difference.
I think improving the quality of the service on weekends and in the evenings and eventually even overnight is going to be tremendous.
*Learn more about All-Access Corridors at https://transit.nashville.gov/pages/service.