History
The company first started as Centre Area Transit (CAT), which was formed to provide a vehicle to subsidize public transit throughout the region. Then on May 17, 1974, the Centre Area Transportation Authority (CATA) was incorporated. By the end of its first year, CATA was officially up and running and its annual ridership was 201,000. By 1979, ridership was continuing to grow year after year prompting CATA to add more bus routes and well as additional buses built by GMC. It was then in 1990 that ridership had officially hit the two million mark. CATA then revised its bus fleet in 1996 by introducing their first fleet of CNG buses built by Orion Bus Industries. The following year, CATA would eventually phase out the remaining GMC diesel-powered buses, in favor for new state-of-the-art New Flyer low-floor CNG buses. Currently, excluding one hydrogen-powered bus, all of CATA's fleet buses are CNG-powered and ridership has exceeded six million passengers, the majority of riders being Penn State students.
Coincidentally, CATA shares the same initials as the Capital Area Transportation Authority in Lansing, Michigan, which provides bus transportation for Michigan State University, who is a Big Ten rival to Penn State since both schools compete for the Land Grant Trophy each year during the regular season in football. Interestingly, both transit authorities were also founded the same year.
Read more about this topic: Centre Area Transportation Authority
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)