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:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)