This bus route is inspiring a new model of transportation funding in southern Fort Wayne

This story is part of Moving Fort Wayne Forward, a year-long reporting effort to engage residents, employers, and community leaders of Greater Fort Wayne around the possibility of a more modern, multimodal transportation system. Read the full series here.

In the late 2000s, Parkview Health faced a problem: The organization sought to expand services, but the size of its new operation turned the search for suitable land away from the community’s center and toward Fort Wayne’s unincorporated northern border.

After more than three years of construction, Parkview opened its flagship regional medical center just north of Dupont Road in March 2012. But the move created a new challenge: the campus sat outside the service area and taxing district of Citilink, Fort Wayne’s public transportation system. This meant that employees and patients who previously rode the bus to Parkview’s Randallia Drive location could no longer access the expanded or relocated services without a car.

Limited by taxing boundaries and budgetary constraints, Citilink could not provide bus service to the new regional medical center without outside intervention. This is when the concept for MedLink, a partnership between Parkview and Citilink, emerged. Now, the concept could inform a new initiative for future partnerships with other employers.

Launched in 2013, MedLink, or Route 15, provides a public bus route from Parkview’s central Randallia Drive location to Parkview Regional Medical Center on Diebold Road. The hospital covers the full cost of the route, and both parties say they benefit from the partnership. 

For Parkview, funding the route serves its mission to benefit the community. Sarah GiaQuinta, MD, Senior Vice President for Community Health and Equity, says that the route is more of a service for the community than a measurable business venture.

“It really is rooted, I think, in the idea of making it accessible,” GiaQuinta tells Input Fort Wayne. “So, not that return on investment, but more so just a community benefit for both patients and coworkers who need it.”

For Citilink, the route fulfills its objective of connecting people to places, but this time without needing to expand its already tight budget. Funding comes from a combination of local, state, and federal funding, along with some revenue from fares, contracts, and sponsorships, as Input reported in July. And while they presented a balanced budget for 2026, with the bipartisan infrastructure bill expiring next year, funding may soon become a dire situation.

As GiaQuinta says, the business return of the route is not a focus for this initiative. Rather, Parkview views the annual approximately $325,000 expenditure as more of a community service, spending an average of $41.65 per passenger boarding the route, with only 30.6 average daily boardings across MedLink’s 255 operating days in 2025, using the latest available data.

In addition, a 2020 Citilink report showed that MedLink had the lowest per-trip ridership of any weekday Citilink route, with only .8 riders per trip compared to the average of 10.1 across the system during this period. And riders might not be using MedLink to connect to either Parkview campus.

Input Fort Wayne spoke to a rider, Robert, at the Parkview Randalia bus stop, who said that he was taking MedLink as a connector for a job interview, rather than to or from either of Parkview’s healthcare facilities.

GiaQuinta mentions that Parkview would be “very open to exploring more effective, maybe more cost-effective ways” that the healthcare system can offer transportation service to coworkers and patients, and that these solutions would likely be a benefit to both Citilink and Parkview to continue searching for ways to “increase ridership and make it a more utilized route.”

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While it is unclear the specific monetary benefit of MedLink in particular, it offers a proof of concept: private funding can help public transit go farther. Citilink hopes to build on that idea through a new coalitional model that it believes will lead to a positive return on investment for companies in an “opportunity zone” near the southern extremity of the city.

They might be right – a 2015 study from Ball State University found that a fixed route bus system in a community reduced annual manufacturing turnover by 1,100 to 1,200 jobs, and a reduction of turnover costs by between $5.3 million and $6.1 million. 

A draft document shared with Input of the local coalition plan for the “Airlink” pilot program indicated that Citilink believes that private funding of a particular route or on-demand service, including employer-funded passes or subsidies, flexible shift schedules aligned with transit service, and sponsorship of stops, could positively impact the budgets of those businesses, which include:

• Amazon
• BAE 
• Clarios/Johnson Controls
• Coca-Cola Bottling
• Ellison Bakery
• Fort Wayne Metals
• Fort Wayne Wire Die
• General Motors
• International Paper

The area also includes Wayne High School and would provide access to Fort Wayne International Airport.

By spreading costs among multiple employers and targeting an on-demand service that intersects established fixed routes for workforce clusters, Citilink hopes to overcome some of the limitations of the original MedLink model.

Using the study from Ball State, Citilink notes that Indiana’s manufacturing sector sees a turnover rate of 50%, which is 11 percentage points above the national average. The study shows that each dollar increase in per-capita bus operating expenditures is associated with a 3-5 percentage point reduction in turnover. With an estimated cost of $12,320 per employee replaced (extrapolated from a 2012 report), a five-percentage-point drop in turnover translates to $616,000 saved annually — nearly double what Parkview pays to fully fund their route. 

While Parkview and Citilink do not collect data to indicate whether Parkview has been a beneficiary of this fixed-route turnover reduction, the study suggests that the manufacturing businesses, the primary target in the Airlink opportunity zone, should see a positive return.

In an email, Scott Glaze, chairman and CEO of Fort Wayne Metals, said that the expansion of Citilink’s transit would have an “immediate impact” on their current and potential future employees in Fort Wayne.

“We’ve had situations where employees have gone through the onboarding process and been unable to continue due to transportation limitations in our area. Increasing access to reliable transportation connects community members with well-paying jobs and allows them to arrive to work safely and on time.”

Washington State experimented with something similar in 2018. Their department of transportation offered a 50% rebate on the cost of ORCA transit subsidies for smaller employers in three counties that had never offered transit subsidies to their employees. From November 2018 to May 2019, 121 employers signed up for the program. The results showed that, of the 1,469 participating employees, nearly 80% increased their public transit use and nearly 75% reduced their driving. Additionally, 97% of employers indicated a likelihood to continue the program, and over 90% of employees indicated satisfaction with the transit cards. 

The same can be said about consumers as well. Citilink predicts that more cash will flow through the local economy if consumers can access the goods and services they need. To test this theory, Citilink collected data on the grocery spend of Wayne Township residents with vouchers riding from Central Station to Southgate Plaza. When the results came in, it showed these residents spent around $100,000 at Kroger in just one year. Casey Claypool, Marketing & Development Director at Citilink, said the organization believes this revenue would not have moved through the local economy if not for that route.

While MedLink’s ridership numbers and cost-per-passenger show little direct return for Parkview, the route accomplished something less visible: it tested the boundaries of how Citilink can expand its service through private partnerships. Lessons from this experiment set the stage for Airlink and what comes next.

Instead of a single-employer subsidy, this new coalitional model allows for businesses in the opportunity zone to invest together in public transportation with measurable returns in reduced turnover, improved access to jobs, and stronger local spending. 

MedLink may prove to be less of an endpoint and more of a starting line in moving toward a Fort Wayne transit network shaped not just by geography, but by collaboration and results.

Thanks to our Presenting Partner, Parkview Health, our Lead Sponsor, AWS Foundation, and to our sponsor, Citilink, for making this story possible.