CrossTown Connect was officially started in 2012 when Governor Patrick’s administration funded a collaboration of Acton, Boxborough, Littleton, Maynard, Stow, and Clock Tower Place through a Community Innovation Challenge Grant. The goal of the project was to work on the regionalization of transportation services, and to put a formal structure in place for future collaboration.
The Patrick Administration developed the Community Innovation Challenge (CIC) grant program in 2012 to encourage and incentivize regionalization. This was based upon the belief that the most crucial and visible interactions between government and citizens occur locally. In three years, the program invested $10.25 million in 74 unique projects that involve 242 municipalities across the Commonwealth.
In 2012, we were awarded $184,575 for the project “Shared Transportation Resources Among Five Municipalities and One Business in the Acton Region.” This first grant established the partnership between Towns of Acton, Boxborough, Littleton, Maynard, and Clock Tower Place, a business in Maynard. This grant allowed the partners to develop a regional transportation system by sharing their individual, limited transportation resources, such as Council on Aging vans. A plan was developed to sustain and continue the program, which resulted in the addition of the communities of Westford and Concord.
In 2013, the group received $60,000 to form a Regional Transportation Management Association. The partners wanted to provide better coordinated transportation services to help commuters going into Boston and Cambridge, reverse commuters coming from the city into the area, suburb to suburb commuters, and local people with daily need trips in the area. CTC also took a major step towards regionalization of community transportation services by consolidating the Acton, Boxborough, Littleton, and Maynard Council on Aging shuttles as well as the Acton MinuteVan Dial-A-Ride and Road Runner services under one Central Dispatch Call Center. For each community, this increased their daily dispatch hours from two to eight, which led to greater efficiency in trips, an increase in ridership and a decrease in cancellations.
In 2015, all of the member towns of CTC signed Community Compacts with the Baker-Polito Administration for best practices in transportation. One of the goals of the Community Compact was to work to bring LRTA and MART to the table to jointly identify and overcome bureaucratic hurdles and streamline redundant operations to better meet the needs of the partner communities. Moving into 2026, Acton operates a fixed bus route along with three on-demand vans. Our transportation vendor provides shared dispatch services that support both Acton and Littleton, ensuring coordinated scheduling, rider communication, and service delivery across both communities.
