AUBURN – The public gets three chances next week to influence possible changes to the Twin Cities bus system.

The Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee has scheduled three meetings on Nov. 12 and 13 to get recommendations from the public.

“If they ride the bus, we want to know what we can do better,” said Marsha Bennett, transit coordinator for the committee. “If they’re not riding, we want to find out why. What can we change to get them to use it?”

The public workshops will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12, at Lewiston City Hall, Mayor’s Conference Room; at 1 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, at Auburn City Hall; and at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in the Barker Arms community room.

The workshops are part of the committee’s effort to update a 2001 study of the “citylink” bus system. Bennett said the study led to several changes: new routes up College Street in Lewiston and to Central Maine Community College in Auburn. It also recommended creating a second hub at Great Falls Plaza in Auburn. Before the study, all bus traffic for both cities began and ended in Lewiston.

The updated version will focus on the route system, ridership statistics and the number of buses, local demographics, development trends and economics.

“These were recommendations to make the system run more smoothly, and they’ve worked,” Bennett said. “The changes recommended in the study, they did happen. They don’t all happen right away, and it may take a couple of years to complete them. But they can happen.”

Bennett said the system is ripe for change. City councilors in both Lewiston and Auburn have called for more robust service, and a report released by a community activist group, The Visible Community, last spring called for more public transit options.

“It all comes down to what the community is willing to invest in the service,” Bennett said. “There may be some improvements we can make that amount to just moving some things around. Those may not cost much. But adding new routes would mean adding more buses, and those are expensive.”

The citylink system owns 10 buses and operates nine routes in Lewiston and Auburn. Ridership had been increasing since 2001, and peaked in 2006 with 214,000 riders.