CARE and LINK GRTC services paused Monday by outage

Henrico County Greater Richmond Transit Authority CARE and LINK service riders are being left in the lurch Monday as the nationwide Amazon Web Services outage is affecting the GRTC’s VIA system.

At about 12:30 pm, GRTC posted a service alert about the outage on its Instagram page stating the pause in the specialized services that require a reservation for the door-to-door service.

Both the CARE ADA paratransit and the LINK Microtransit vehicle services are on demand and are considerably lower cost than hiring a ride share service as the services are either free or extremely low cost.

Both can be reserved through a VIA app platform, which was affected by the outage.

Affected LINK geographic zones serving transit riders in Henrico County include the popular Sandston Zone, which connects to the 4B Oakwood/Darbytown, 7A and 7B Airport routes and the 91 Laburnum Connector.

The Azalea Link Zone, connects to the Route 1 Chamberlayne/Downtown and the Laburnum Connector, serving people at locations such as Henrico High School.

The GRTC Performance Dashboard showed frequent LINK and CARE services usage.

During the past 12 months, the Azalea LINK route has served 37,000 riders, and the Sandston LINK route has served 17,500 riders.

System-wide, the CARE On-Demand service served 70,000 rides and the CARE and CARE Plus service served 181,000 riders systemwide during the past two years.

GRTC did not offer an alternative travel option for riders that rely on the CARE or LINK routes on Monday in its social media message, but promised to share updates “as soon as service is restored.”

Dina Weinstein is the Citizen’s community vitality reporter and a Report for America corps member, covering housing, health and transportation. Support her work and articles like this one by making a contribution to the Citizen.