Network Redesign

Atlanta: A Draft Redesign of the Bus Network

Posted on December 12, 2024 in Atlanta, General, Network Redesign

After much hard work, intense discussions, extensive public outreach, and a pandemic, we’re finally ready for public comment on the draft MARTA “NextGen” bus network redesign, whjch covers Atlanta and the neighboring cities in Fulton and DeKalb Counties. (Clayton County is also part of MARTA but being addressed by a different process.)

The project website has all kinds of maps and useful information. But if you’re curious, I hope you will delve into our readable full report (download high resolution pdf, or view low resolution pdf). There you’ll find a complete explanation of the thinking that led to the proposal as it stands.

This is the first complete rethinking of the bus network since the MARTA rail system opened 45 years ago. Back then, the core idea of the network was that the purposes of buses was to feed the rail system, producing a network overwhelmingly suited to bringing people into downtown Atlanta. But since then, much has changed about the region and it transit demand:

Many suburban employment and activity centers have developed, some of which are well suited to transit service.
The rise of working from home after Covid-19 has reduced the downtown rush hour commute market.
The need is greater than ever for all-day, all-week, all-direction trips that matter to lower income people. Many of these trips are not going downtown, but to activity and job destinations all over the region.

We have done our best to redesign the network reflecting these changes. Big ideas include:

More lines that run frequently (every 15 minutes or better) all day and on weekends. These are in red on our maps below.
More lines that continue past rail stations instead of ending at them, to connect more destinations with fewer transfers.

Is this all of the service that the service area needs? No, it is what MARTA can afford, given its other commitments and the decisions that have been made about priorities. MARTA directed us to plan for a total service budget that is slightly lower than 2019 though higher than 2023. I wish we could have proposed far more service than this.

Still, within these constraints, the plan achieves some dramatic improvements. Here is the Fall 2023 network on the left, which we used as a baseline, and the proposed “NextGen” network on the right. (These are just diagrams. Much more detailed maps are on the project website and in our report.)

Some key facts:

The average number of jobs reachable in an hour goes up by 21% for all residents, 23% for racial minority residents, and 23% for low income residents. (Why does this matter?)
The number of residents within 1/4 mile of service goes up by 2%.
The number of residents within 1/4 mile of frequent service (every 15 minutes or better all day, shown in red above) goes up by 245%.

I hope you’ll take the time to peruse our friendly report, which talks through the whole thought process and explains how we got to this recommendation. Then, if you live or travel in the MARTA service area, please comment! MARTA is taking comments through February.

Waterford, Ireland: A Plan to Double Public Transport Service

Posted on July 10, 2024 in General, Network Redesign

Waterford’s central bus interchange point. Source: Google Street View

One of the highlights of my career, and of our firm‘s recent history, has been a series of contracts for the National Transport Authority in the Republic of Ireland to redesign the bus networks of all the main cities, part of a larger national strategy called BusConnects. We started in Dublin in 2017, and have been progressing through the other four Irish cities: first Cork, then Galway and Limerick, and now finally Waterford, which has a metro area population of about 83,000. Dublin is now half-implemented, while the rest will be implemented over the next several years.

Our Draft New Network for Waterford was released Monday for public comment. It proposes to improve frequencies; replace one-way loops with two-way lines; add weekend service; and cover new areas. It would double the quantity of bus service in Waterford. I’m not sure we have ever before been asked to plan such a large expansion of service for relatively short-term implementation.

The level of policy clarity behind this expansion is remarkable. Ireland has “done the maths” about what must be done to achieve national goals for emissions and for social welfare, and has concluded that a big investment in urban buses is key to those goals. Ireland has a cost-effective rail improvement program, but it is still mostly a nation of roads. Its development pattern is dense compared to US cities but low-density compared to Continental Europe. (For example, most urban Irish housing is either rows of townhouses or semi-detached houses, what North Americans would call duplexes.) So the Irish government has concluded that only road-based public transport, developed at scale, can reach enough of the population to be relevant. They’ve also followed the logic through to land use planning, hiring us to write a guidebook, now published, on how to plan for useful, efficient bus services when laying out new suburbs and towns.

The planned service increases are massive. Dublin already had the most extensive network of the Irish cities, but even in Dublin NTA is increasing service by over 30%. The increases will be around 45% in Cork, Galway and Limerick, and now 100%, a doubling of service, in Waterford.

Why so much more? Waterford is starting with a fairly minimal network by Irish standards. Here’s the existing network. It’s five routes, with frequencies of 20-30 minutes. (Note that in a departure from our usual mapping style, we’re using linewidth rather than colour to indicate frequency, mostly because if we drew all these entangled loops in the same two colours you’d never be able to follow it.)

Considering that it is made up of only five routes, the Waterford network is quite complex. Much of the complexity is caused by one-way loops: two routes are entirely one-way loops, and the other three routes have sections of one-way loop or one-way split. The benefit of all these one-way services is that a large area can be covered without using much service, but it makes people’s trips time-consuming, and it makes the network harder to understand.

And here is the proposed network. Every route will offer two-way service. The wide lines stand for service every 15 minutes, 7-days-a-week. The narrow lines stand for service every 30 minutes, 7-days-a-week.

This design achieves several things:

It’s radically simpler, because all routes are two way (with the exception of some short segments on one-way streets in the centre).
It fits frequency better to demand. It offers 15-minute “turn up and go” frequency linking the biggest destinations, including the University (SETU), the city Centre, and the main hospital on the east side. Most of the really dense parts of Waterford are on these segments.
It creates secondary focal points at the University (SETU) and hospital, offering direct service to these points from most of the areas surrounding them.
It covers several recent new developments.
Fewer routes end in the city centre. Instead, proposed Routes 1, 2, and 4 run through the centre and onward to the other side of the city. This reduces the need to interchange for many cross-city trips, and also makes better use of the limited space for terminating buses in the city centre.

As always, this is a draft! We know it will be improved by public feedback, which is already coming in. We look forward to the public conversation that starts now, and runs through 16 August.

Click here to explore the plan and express your view. You can find our entire report, with all of the details, here.

Miami: The Better Bus Network Is Here!

Posted on November 9, 2023 in General, Miami, Network Redesign

A slice of Miami-Dade’s Better Bus Network. See the link below for the full map.

On November 13, the greater Miami area will see the biggest transformation in where you can go on public transit since Metrorail opened almost 40 years ago. Not a new rail line, but a huge redesign of the bus network that will make it useful to more people for more trips, all over the County. A complete map of the new network is here.

Miami-Dade County’s buses run in patterns that have often been the same for decades, even as the county has grown and many new destinations have appeared. It’s hard to change bus service, because even the most inefficient bus route has people who depend on it and will object to any changes. So, to redesign a bus network, we have to show big benefits that make the change worth the trouble, and that’s what this redesign does.

The plan is the result of a planning project that begin in 2019. In an unusual partnership, Transit Alliance Miami funded much of the work and hired us (Jarrett Walker + Associates) to lead the planning process in partnership with the County. We led a public conversation around key trade-offs, by sharing contrasting network design concepts that showed the consequences of different possible goals. Based on the response to that process, we developed a Draft Plan in early 2020. We were then rudely interrupted by Covid-19.

Since 2020, the County has worked to finish the plan and as published a revised plan, with 30% more service, in 2021. Unfortunately, the transit industry was hit by the labor shortages of the post-Covid era, and the plan had to be reworked to manage with a smaller workforce than previously imagined. Even with the changes, the final plan now being implemented still delivers great results for huge swaths of the county, its residents, workers, and visitors.

With the new design, a frequent grid will cover large parts of the county with huge benefits. The simplest measure of that improvement is how many people or jobs are near service. The chart below shows the change in residents or jobs near service by the frequency of service at midday on weekdays. The number of residents who live near frequent transit will increase from 380,000 (14 of the County’s residents%) to 814,000 (30%) during weekday service. The new network will bring frequent service near almost 60% of households without cars; that’s 20,000 additional households without cars near more frequent service. And jobs near frequent service will increase from 29% to 43% on weekdays.

A key measure of a network’s usefulness is the access it provides, or how much stuff you can reach in a reasonable travel time. The animated map below shows an example of this change from Little Haiti.

In pink is the area you can reach in the Existing Network in 45 minutes. In blue is the area you can reach with the Better Bus Network. The blue area is larger, but more importantly it has a lot more stuff in it: 30% more jobs and 60% more residents. So if you lived near this place, you would effectively be 30% more free. And if you owned a business here, you’d now have access to 60% more customers, or 60% more workers.

We can measure this exact thing over and over again across the whole county and when we summarize the results we find that the average resident will be able to get to 28% more jobs (or other useful destinations) in 45 minutes. The benefit is even greater for lower-income residents and people of color. That means more people, when they look up a trip they might make, will find that the travel time is reasonable. For more on why we use this measure, see here.

The other big improvement in this new network is a major increase in frequency of service on weekends. Across the country, we’ve worked on network plans that have increased service on evenings and weekends and they’ve often shown huge ridership gains. People value flexibility and spontaneity. Everyone wants the ability to get home outside of the traditional 8-to-5 workday. Critically, though, people working in retail or restaurant jobs often need to work on weekends. A route that runs infrequently on the weekends is missing the peak time for people in these industries, and there are many, many people in these industries in Miami-Dade.

Implementing Big Change

Our team has been working closely with Miami-Dade staff to assist with a range of implementation needs. How does a huge change like this happen overnight? Months, sometimes years, of planning leads up to a big day like this. These efforts included:

Work by staff across County government to help people find out about the change, and can learn about it easily.
Briefings of elected officials including partners in the city governments.
An analysis of compliance with Title VI, the US Civil Rights law that ensures racial equity in transit planning.
Siting of new bus stops and removing old stops.
Writing new schedules for customers and bus operators.
A big effort by operations and safety teams working on testing turns, reviewing stop locations, working with operators to learn new routes, and much more.
Finally, an infusion of temporary staff near the change date, to be out on the street helping people find their way.

It takes an enormous team effort and County staff have worked hard for a long-time to make this day happen. Transit Alliance has continued to partner with the county to help with communicating the network changes to the public and we’ve been please to assist in that process. Our team has contributed in a few key ways:

A new system map with routes color-coded by frequency. These maps will start showing up in shelters around the county soon.
An interactive trip comparison tool to help folks find out how they can make their trips on the new network.
Developing bus stop signage to inform riders at each stop about which routes are changing.

We’re excited to see how people respond to this new network and we hope it helps set the stage for many transit improvements to come as the County implements its long-term SMART plan.

Basics: Why Aren’t the Buses Timed to Meet the Trains?

Posted on October 30, 2023 in Basics, Connections and Transfers, Connections, Transfers, Network Redesign, Rail Transit

Short answer: Because the buses are timed to meet each other, and this is harder than it looks.

Long answer: If you’ve used public transit in an area that has infrequent trains, including the suburbs of many cities, you’ve probably wondered why the bus and train schedules aren’t coordinated. Why didn’t they write the bus schedule so that the bus would meet the train?

First of all, let’s gently note the bias in the question. Why didn’t you ask why the train wasn’t scheduled to meet the bus? We assume that because trains are bigger, faster, and more rigid, they are superior and buses are subordinate. You’ll even hear some bus routes described as “feeders”, implying that they have no purpose but to bring customers to the dominant mode.

But it’s rare for an efficient bus route to have no other purpose than feeding the train. Public transit thrives on the diversity of purposes that the same vehicle trip can serve. At a busy rush hour time, you may encounter a true feeder bus that’s timed to the train and will even wait if the train is late. But most bus services carry many people locally in their area, on trips that don’t involve the train connection. For these networks to work, they have to connect well with themselves, and this is harder than it looks.

We’re talking here about infrequent bus routes (generally every 30 minutes or worse) and infrequent trains. When frequency is high, no special effort is needed to make the connection work.

Pulse scheduling. Buses of many lines are coordinated so that buses meet at the same time each hour, allowing fast transfers despite low frequency.

Infrequent transit networks have a huge problem. There’s not just a long wait for the initial bus or train. There’s also a long wait for any connection you may need to make to reach your destination. We often combat this problem with pulse scheduling. At key hubs, we schedule the buses to all meet at the same time each hour or half hour, so that people can make connections quickly even though frequencies are low. We design the whole network around those connections, because they are so important to making the network useful.

That means that the whole schedule has to have a regular repeating pattern. As much as possible we want this pattern to repeat every hour, so that it’s easy to remember. We even design route lengths to cycle well in this amount of time, or multiples of it.

If the train schedule has a similar pattern, we will certainly look at it and try to match our pattern to it. But the timing of a pulse determines the schedules of all the routes serving that point. Sometimes we have lattices of interacting pulses at several points, which can make an entire network interdependent. You can’t change any of these schedules without changing all of them, or you lose the fast connections between infrequent bus routes that makes suburban networks usable.

Sometimes, an infrequent trunk train service will also present a repeating hourly cycle in its schedule, and if so, we’ll look at that and try to coordinate with it. But at most this will be possible at a couple of stations where the timing works well, because of the way the local bus schedules are all connected.

More commonly, especially in North America, we face an irregular regional rail or “commuter rail” schedule, where there may be a regular midday pattern but there’s often no pattern at other times. The pattern may often shift during the day for various reasons that make sense for the train operation. All this is toxic to timing with the local bus network. Local bus networks need that repeating hourly pattern to be efficient and legible. For example, if at 1 PM the train pattern suddenly moves five minutes earlier, the bus network can’t adapt to that without opening up a gap in its schedules that will affect lots of other people.

Usually, the regional rail network and the local bus network are part of different transit authorities, which makes this an even bigger challenge. A particular problem in multi-authority region is that different authorities may have different schedule change dates, sometimes baked into their labor agreements, and this prevents them from all changing together at the same time. But the core problem isn’t just institutional. Merging the authorities won’t solve it. No efficient bus system – working with sparse resources and therefore offering infrequent service – can make timed connections with a train schedule at every station, and especially not if the train schedule is irregular. It’s just not mathematically possible.

The best possible outcomes happen when the rail and bus authorities have a relationship that recognizes their interdependence rather than one based on a supposed hierarchy. That means that the rail authority recognizes that the local bus authorities can only connect with a repeating hourly schedule pattern, and tries to provide one. It also means that rail schedule changes are made with plenty of warning so that there’s time for bus authorities to adapt.

With the decline of rush-hour commuting due to increased working from home, transit demand is even more all-directions and all-the-time. It no longer makes sense to just assume that one trip – say, the commute to the big city – is superior to another, like the local trip to a grocery store or retail job. All possible trips matter, and we get the best transit network when authorities coordinate to provide the best possible connections for all of them.

Portland: Big Transit Service Changes in SW Hills

Posted on August 27, 2023 in General, Network Redesign, Portland

Here is a little deep dive into how bus network designers think, with an example from very close to (my) home.

Over the past year, our firm has been working with the Portland area transit agency, TriMet, on the “Forward Together” project, which developed a plan for the next several years of bus service improvements. (The plan will eventually represent about 10% more service than the agency ran in 2019, but TriMet is still recovering from post-Covid workforce shortages, so it can’t do everything at once.) The plan went through major public outreach and was adopted earlier this year, and a few items have already been implemented. Now, (August 27, 2023) they are rolling out what will probably be the most controversial part of the package, a series of big changes in Portland’s southwest hills.

The Forward Together plan was motivated by twin goals of ridership and equity. In general, the plan retains and expands services that either:

… will attract high ridership, because they provide useful service to lots of people, OR
… focus on areas with low-income and/or minority populations where the need for transit is greatest.

The plan includes a major expansion of the Frequent Network in high demand areas, and new local routes in underserved suburban areas with large low-income populations. Where TriMet was running services that are justified neither by ridership nor by equity, the plan reduces or even eliminates those services. That’s because even though the total service budget is growing, TriMet is also trying to align its services with current goals, rather than just continuing to run services designed around the goals of the past. I wouldn’t recommend this in every city, but this is the answer to the specific problem posed by TriMet’s limited resources and the goals they have adopted.

Let me give you a quick tour of SW Portland, using TriMet’s map of the old (2022) network.

TriMet network in 2022, before the changes. Green number shields and wider lines denote high frequency. Dashed lines run only briefly (mostly rush hour only). Map by TriMet.

Downtown Portland is in the NE corner of the map, where all of the colorful light rail lines converge. Immediately west of downtown is a bank of steep hills, running north-south. Just southwest of downtown, where you see Line 8 ending in a loop, is a huge hilltop complex of medical destinations, including the Veterans Hospital and the old part of the Oregon Health and Science University campus. This area, called Marquam Hill, is one of Portland’s biggest transit destinations outside of downtown.

Along the west and south edges of the map are the inner-ring suburban cities of Beaverton, Tigard, and Lake Oswego along with the Washington Square Mall. That ring, linked by orbital lines 76 and 78, is typical older suburban fabric with some dense centers but heavy car orientation.

TriMet’s mapping style makes all the bus routes blue but distinguishes the Frequent Service Network (every 15 minutes all day) with a slightly wider line and a green number sheld. You can see that there are two big frequent corridors in SW Portland: 54 along Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy and, further south, the 12 along Barbur Blvd. Except for those two corridors, inner SW Portland (excluding the inner-ring suburbs) is mostly low-density and relatively affluent.

With a focus on ridership and equity, and the drop in downtown commuting due to ongoing work-from-home, this area just had to be rethought. Here is the new network as of August 27, 2023:

New TriMet network, same color scheme as the map above. Map by TriMet.

As I mentioned, the plan does delete some services that meet neither ridership nor equity goals, mostly all-day local routes in affluent low-density areas that had little ridership except at school times. Some of these are reduced to school-hour trips only, and a few, such as the 50 in the NW corner of the map, are dropped entirely.

In addition, this redesign seeks ridership and equity with two other big moves:

Shift in focus from peak to all day.
Shift in focus from office commute destinations to destinations of diverse workers and visitors.

The old network also had a number of services geared to bringing office workers downtown. As in most US cities, there are fewer of these commuters than there were, and like many agencies, TriMet has heard that it needed to provide better service to a more diverse audience, not just office workers but also everyone else traveling all the time for all kinds of purposes. So some specialized downtown-oriented services were removed. In the old network, for example, Line 94 in the southwest corner of the map approached from suburbs beyond Tigard and went all the way into downtown duplicating Line 12. That was no longer justifiable, so in the new network those riders will need to use Line 12 to complete their trips.

But the biggest and most complicated reworking, encompassing all of these issues, happened at Marquam Hill. At Portland’s largest medical destination, the network had become too focused on rush hour, even though medical workers and patients come and go all day.

The hill has long had Line 8, a Frequent Service bus to downtown, and it also has a cute aerial tram to another medical campus nearby. It also had a big network of rush hour express routes from all directions, numbered in the 60s. These routes duplicated all-day services and mostly helped people avoid transferring. That can be justified only if the buses were full, and they no longer were. They ran only at rush hour, which meant they were not useful to many of the lower-income people working shifts all around the clock at the hospitals.

We needed to rework this to remove some of the duplicative rush hour service, and to provide a more useful all-day pattern of service from the south. In the old network, you could get to Marquam Hill from the south only at rush hour. To do this, we revised two of the lower-ridership southwest lines (43 and 56) so that instead of going downtown, they’ll go to Marquam Hill. Where they cross Line 54 in the Hillsdale district, just south of Marquam Hill, people coming off of outer part of these lines will need to transfer if they are going downtown, but people from all over the southwest will be able to use these lines to get to Marquam Hill much more directly.

This is an inconvenience to some existing downtown riders, so we selected routes where that would affect as few people as possible. We chose Line 56 for this role because much of this line duplicates the Frequent Line 54, which is being upgraded to be Frequent all the way to Beaverton. The segment along Beaverton Hillsdale Highway served by both 54 and 56 is where most of Line 56’s ridership is. Only riders from the Scholls Ferry Road segment of 56 will need to transfer to reach downtown, and this is not a high-demand area. Meanwhile, the segment of Beavertion-Hillsdale Highway where 54 and 56 run together has many low-income apartment areas where people depend on transit. Instead of giving them duplicative routes to downtown, the new arrangement gives them direct Frequent service to downtown (54) and a direct bus to Marquam Hill. There’s no avoiding some duplication here, but this change makes it less wasteful and more useful.

As for Line 43, this issue is rich with memories, as I lived near the intersection of Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry as a teenager. I was at TriMet as a teenage intern when the current shape of the line was designed, and while I used it I knew it would always be a poor performer. Much of the line is close to the more frequent Line 12 on Barbur, and if you are west of where the two lines cross, the 43 is so slow to downtown that it makes sense to transfer to the 12 for a faster trip. That’s one reason why we felt that only a small area (between Barbur Blvd. Transit Center and Macadam Ave) would be affected if we reoriented this route to Marquam Hill, an area that had neither high ridership nor a high priority on equity grounds. (It does have one business district, which we served another way; read on.)

Just south of there, the plan removes Line 39 from Lewis & Clark College, prompting the biggest outcry in the public outreach. Lewis & Clark is a liberal arts college located on what is effectively a cul-de-sac for transit.[1] It’s not on the way to any other destinations, so it has to justify its service all by itself. Ridership was poor, and the campus was running its own shuttles to downtown. The final design here divides Line 35, which runs along Macadam Avenue just west of the river, and sends half the service via Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry — not directly to Lewis & Clark’s front door anymore, but within a short walk. This change restored direct all-day downtown service from the business district at Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry, which was losing it with the removal of Line 43. I’m normally very resistant to this kind of splitting of service because it reduces frequency. Here, however, it was the right solution because the segment of Riverside Drive that loses half of its Line 35 service is very low-density, very affluent, and has almost no ridership.

There’s a nice side effect of this change: new all-day service to the main gate of Tryon Creek State Natural Area, one of Portland’s most spectacular wilderness parks. A great new opportunity for people to get out into nature on transit.

You can explore the whole plan, and the justification for each part of it, in our Forward Together final report, which is online. There you’ll find both an explanation of each change, and also a description of the how the plan was revised in response to public outreach. Not everyone will like these changes, but they will help TriMet create a more efficient network that’s useful to more people, and more people who really need it.

[1] The neighborhood beyond Lewis & Clark, called Dunthorpe, is very, very low-density and affluent. Before the big redesigns of 1979-82 it had its own bus route from downtown, evidence of how completely oriented toward coverage (rather than ridership) the system was in those days. Today, nobody would think of running buses into Dunthorpe, probably least of all the fortunate folks who live there.

Madison: Welcome to Your New Network

Posted on June 11, 2023 in Network Redesign

Today, the city buses in Madison, Wisconsin began doing something new, thanks to a network redesign project that our firm developed with our friends at Madison Metro. Core parts of the network will run frequently all day for the first time. More important, many travel times across the city will be much faster, because the plan deemphasizes four satellite transfer points that had been a big source of delay.

Here’s the city’s map of its new network. (Click to enlarge, or see the original here.) Lines A, B, C, and D are all frequent (every 15 minutes all day) out to the point where they branch. (A1 and A2 refer to branches of Line A.)

Line A is designed to match the path of the forthcoming Bus Rapid Transit project, while Line B is the next BRT project after that one.

How much better is this? Here was the old network, in our style where red lines indicate high frequency:

The old network was all infrequent, except for the University of Wisconsin’s shuttle routes 80 and 84. The new network, by contrast, has four frequent lines (A-D) covering all of the densest inner city and radiating outward in several directions. But the oddest feature of the old network was the four satellite transfer points located just a few miles out from the city center. Most of the outlying area was on feeder routes, requiring a connection at one of these points just to reach downtown or the University of Wisconsin. These points did make it easy for people to travel locally within their area, but on balance, they did more to obstruct trips than they did to enable them.

Our plan largely deemphasized these facilities. Now, most of the city is on a direct route to the center, with much faster travel times. Satellite hubs can be valuable to foster a network that serves trips in many directions, but the South, East, and North Transfer points were too close to the center to serve as good hubs, and none of them had significant destinations at them that could benefit from the converging service. East Towne Mall, further out to the northeast, has a better future as a hub, both because it’s far enough from downtown and because it is a destination in its own right. The same may be true of West Towne Mall on the west side (where the new network’s A, H, and J routes converge.) However, even if those hubs emerge, the main radial services (Line A) will flow through them, not be interrupted by them.

We had a great time working in Madison. The city has many engaged advocates and stakeholders who provided great feedback, and many elected officials gave the project a lot of time and attention. We hope the new network will help people in Madison go to places they’d never have gone to before, to do things they might never have done.

Atlanta: You Have Choices for Your Transit Future

Posted on August 14, 2022 in Atlanta, General, Network Redesign

Source: “Atlantacitizen” at English language Wikipedia

For over a year now we have been working with the metro Atlanta transit agency MARTA on a study to potentially redesign their bus network.

A bus network plan isn’t just about bus service! It’s also about how public transit contributes to all kinds of goals that residents care about, including equity, prosperity, managing congestion, and reducing emissions. Bus service is relevant to redevelopment, too, because this study will help determine where it is viable to live without a car.

We’ve analyzed the existing system and patterns of demand. Now, we really need everyone in the region to tell us what their priorities are. If you live in Fulton, Clayton, or DeKalb Counties, your opinion matters and we need you to speak up. The future design of the bus system will depend on what you tell us now!

There’s no money to add service above 2019 levels, so we have to make some hard choices. To illustrate these choices, we’ve sketched two contrasting alternatives for what the network might look like. We need you to have a look at these and tell us what you think.

To see the alternatives, and take the survey, just click here.

Please share this with everyone you know in the region!

Miami: A Revised New Network

Posted on September 8, 2021 in Miami, Network Redesign

Esta página está disponible en español aquí.

In 2019 and 2020, we collaborated with Transit Alliance Miami to help them develop a new bus network for all of Miami-Dade County. In April the Final Plan was published and put out for public comment by Miami-Dade Transit and their survey showed that 89% of people wanted to see the changes implemented! In October 2021, the County Commission approved the plan for implementation.

This is what the existing network looks like:

Frequency coded public transit map excerpt from the existing network centered around Miami, Florida

Existing Network. Colors mean all-day frequency! Purple = 10 minutes or better. Red = 15. Orange = 20. Blue = 30. Green = 60.

And here is the revised network with fewer routes, less duplication, more frequency:

Frequency coded public transit map excerpt from the revised network centered around Miami, Florida

Revised Network. Colors mean all-day frequency! Purple = 10 minutes or better. Red = 15. Orange = 20. Blue = 30. Green = 60.

(This is not our mapping style, by the way. It’s from a tool developed by Kittelson Associates that lets you move a slider back and forth between the two maps, so that you can see how different they are in the same place. It can be a little clunky. Look close for a vertical grey bar and you’ll find you can slide it left and right. If it isn’t working, reload.)

The revisions to the Better Bus Network since April are relatively modest and include adding back some coverage routes in a few places, some extensions and improvements to service on the beach and a few other corridors. These changes are possible because the revised network provides more service than what we originally planned because the County is now proposing to invest in 7% more bus service than the pre-pandemic network!

As we’ve said before, the Better Bus Network as drawn last year wasn’t what Miami-Dade needed, it was what Miami-Dade could afford. It’s great to see political leaders at the County, led by Mayor Cava, willing to invest in more service to achieve better outcomes.

Miami: A New Network with a Resilience Plan

Posted on October 17, 2020 in Miami, Network Redesign

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For the past 18 months, we have been redesigning the bus network for Miami-Dade County, Florida with the local advocacy group Transit Alliance. As the final public engagement phase was coming to an end, the pandemic reached the United States, and like many other agencies, Miami-Dade Transit went into crisis management mode. So our work paused for about four months.

As the pandemic wore on, it became apparent that the agency needed more than a single transit network ready to implement. It needed a plan that could adapt to a range of unpredictable futures. Nobody knows how long the pandemic will go on, or what affect it will have on tax revenues that the agency relies on.

So, in finalizing the Better Bus Network, we worked with county staff and Transit Alliance to develop a Resilience Plan, to guide future decisions about how to ramp service up or down in the face of an unknown future.

But first, let’s talk about how we got here.

In the first phase of the project, we developed a Choices Report to analyze the existing network and discuss key questions that determine how the network should be designed. We took input from the public about those questions and developed two concept networks that highlight the tradeoffs between focusing on coverage and focusing on ridership. We returned to the public to ask them which way they lean between these the two concepts. Remember that it’s never one or the other; the ridership and coverage concepts represent two ends of a spectrum. Based on public input, we designed a Draft Network that was halfway between the two Concepts and now we revised it into the Final Network.

Below are slices of the Existing Network and New Network for the core of the region (click the maps to see the full-size maps of both networks).

A comparison of the maps of the Existing Network and the Final Better Bus Network in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Note the line colors, which indicate midday frequency.

Click here for the full map of the Existing Network

Click here for the full map of the Final Better Bus Network

The New Network creates a frequent grid that helps residents get to more places sooner. In this network, 353,000 more residents are near a frequent route (an increase of 13% over the existing network). With the new network, the average resident can reach 36% more jobs in 45 minutes by walking and transit.

The frequent grid means that it is easier for people to make connections between routes allowing them to get to many more places in a reasonable amount of time. The following animation shows where someone can get to in 45 minutes by walking and transit from Liberty City (NW 12^th Avenue and 62^nd Street). The gray area shows where someone can get to with the Existing Network and the light blue area shows where they can get to with the New Network. With the Better Bus Network, someone living in Liberty City can get to 60% more jobs and 50% more people. This is what we mean by access to opportunity.

This map shows the areas reachable from Liberty City within 45 minutes using the Existing Network and using the redesigned Final Network

This vast expansion in access is only possible because of the frequent grid. This means that if Miami-Dade Transit has less revenue but wants to maximize access like this, they have to protect the frequent grid. That is what the Resilience Plan does. The network’s corridors are divided into tiers to establish what service should be provided at different levels of revenue.

The Resilience Plan protects the frequent grid in case of budget shortfall.

In the grimmest financial scenario (Tier 1), the network would keep only frequent corridors spaced every mile, and a few coverage routes that are critical to ensuring equitable access. Yes, this network will make people walk longer distances. But when they get to a route, a bus is always coming soon. If the County has more revenue, they can add the service in Tier 2 and so forth.

Nobody wants to see these service cuts, but if they become necessary, MDT will be able to minimize the damage to people’s access to opportunity by using the Resilience Plan. On the other hand, if MDT did service cuts the usual way – by leaving the routes as they are but cutting frequencies – access to opportunity would decrease drastically. Consolidating routes to make them more frequent can actually make people’s trips faster, despite the longer walks.

This Final Network is now in the hands of the County Commission to endorse and, if approved, to be implemented by Miami-Dade Transit. There will likely be additional opportunities to comment on this plan before it is implemented. If you’re in Miami-Dade County, remember to submit a comment or tell your Commissioner about this Plan, particularly if you like it. Sadly, most of the public comments received on transit plans are negative even if the plan is broadly popular, because people who like it falsely assume it will happen anyway. This plan will not be implemented if it does not attract strong support. The County would like constructive comments about the plan, which will be used to make the final implementation even better. But if you like the plan, it’s important to say that as well!

Miami-Dade: A Draft New Network

Posted on March 2, 2020 in Miami, Network Redesign

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For the last year we’ve been working on a bus network redesign project in Miami-Dade County, Florida, partnering with the local advocacy group Transit Alliance on their Better Bus Project. In this unusual arrangement, Transit Alliance is paying for much of the work out of funds that they have raised, though of course Miami-Dade Transit is an active partner in working to develop a plan they can implement.

A draft of the New Network is now out and ready for community input, and you can read the full report here. This New Network is based on the public input received on the Concepts released last fall and it reflects a shift in the balance of ridership and coverage goals toward higher ridership based on the public response to those concepts. This New Network has been created in partnership with Transit Alliance, County, and municipal staff, and in particular City of Miami and Miami Beach staff who have helped guide the redesign of municipal trolleys.

The local newspaper, the Miami Herald, has a good article about the Draft Network and the major improvements it provides to most people in Miami-Dade. If you live in Miami-Dade you should study this New Network and take the survey before March 31^st.

We previously released a Choices Report that highlighted one of the major shortcomings of the existing network, a lack of a frequent grid. The New Network builds more of a frequent grid, at least in the core of the network, through consolidation of closely spaced routes, trading roles between the County and municipal trolleys, especially in the City of Miami, and some reductions in coverage, particularly in municipalities that provide trolley service.

Below are slices of the Existing Network and New Network for the core of the region (click the maps to see the full size maps of both networks).

Existing Network

New Network

The result of this frequent grid is that 368,000 more residents are near a frequent route, which brings the total population near frequent service to 25%. In the Existing Network only 11% of residents are near a frequent route.

The power of the frequent grid means that there is a vast expansion in where people can go in a reasonable amount of time. Below is a comparison of where someone who is starting in Liberty City (NW 12^th Avenue and 62^nd Street) can reach in 45 minutes by walking and transit. The gray area is what is reachable today under the Existing Network. The light blue area is the area reachable with the New Network. The frequent grid in the New Network vastly expands your freedom if you live here and means you could reach 60% more jobs and 55% more people.

We can assess this change for all people and places across the county and doing so gives us the map below, showing in blue the areas where people can reach more jobs and in red the areas where people can reach fewer jobs with the New Network. Each dot in this map represents 100 people.

The map shows that the vast majority of people and places see a large increase in job access. Averaged across the entire county, the typical county resident would be able to reach 33% more jobs in an hour with this New Network.

Now these improvements are part of some painful compromises. This network emphasizes Ridership goals more than the Existing Network. Thus, some low productivity routes serving Coverage goals are cut so that more frequency can be provided in dense, walkable, linear places. Overall, about 3% more residents would be more than ½ mile from service with the New Network.

The New Network costs the same as the Existing Network and is fully implementable within six to nine months, but this network isn’t going to be implemented until the public, stakeholders, riders, and others have a chance to consider this change and respond. So, read up and tell Transit Alliance and the County what you think.

If you agree this New Network would be an improvement for Miami-Dade, it’s important to speak up because many people who will benefit from this New Network won’t be paying attention and won’t speak up. And if you don’t like the plan, please let Transit Alliance and MDT know how it can be improved. But remember, any change must be made in a cost neutral way, so an increase in service in one place means we have to cut service somewhere else. We always get great ideas out of public comments at this point.

It’s also important to think beyond current and potential transit riders to all the other interests that will benefit. A vast expansion in where people can get to means better access to jobs, services and shopping across the county. Businesses can see how the plan improves access for their employees and customers. Finally, everyone who cares about transit outcomes – economic, environmental, or social – should care about what this plan could achieve.

Finally, as consultant, we don’t claim that this is all the service that the county needs; it’s just what the county and cities can currently afford. There are obvious places were additional investment in service would greatly improve access for thousands of people. Some ideas for improvement are documented in the Report on the New Network, such as increasing the frequency of service on the 20-minute routes in the New Network (Routes 9, 62, 88). Also, on Sundays most of the frequent network becomes every 20 minutes. In a region with such a large tourist economy, Sunday service should be closer to weekday and Saturday levels.

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