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Network Redesign

Akron: Major Ridership Growth Through Network Redesign

Posted on November 2, 2025 in General, Network Redesign 1

(The introduction to this series of posts is here.)

During the pandemic, we did a network redesign for Akron’s transit agency METRO.  The agency covers all of Summit County, Ohio, the next county south of the Cleveland area.  We already knew the neighborhood, having worked on Greater Cleveland RTA’s redesign a few years earlier.  Evan Landman was our project manager.

Historically an industrial town, Akron has experienced the familiar rust-belt decline.  There is still manufacturing, but it relies on a smaller and more diverse economy, including a university downtown, medical centers, and so on.

The agency had already adopted a Strategic Plan that called for a focus on the busiest corridors, while maintaining connectivity for people with the greatest level of need.

Here is the old network on the left, and the new network that emerged from the project on the right (click on all images to enlarge and sharpen.)  Note the legend!   As always on our maps, colors mean frequency, and that’s critical.

The old Akron network on the left, the new one (“Stable Scenario” on the right. Click to enlarge and sharpen.

A few things are especially worth noting here:

  • The old network’s most frequent routes were every 20 minutes, just below the 15 minute threshold where service starts to really become useful. Because most other routes were every 30 minutes, there was no way to coordinate timed connections downtown.
  • The old network had a downtown circulator that was just too short, and that could be replaced by a portion of a longer, more frequent line.
  • The south central part of the city, a relatively low-income and diverse area, had a complex tangle of four overlapping routes that all came only once an hour. We replaced these with fewer, more frequent services that overlap each other less, a common way to increase access.
  • We’re especially proud of what was possible in the vast rural area north of Akron, which borders the Cleveland urban area just off the map to the north. This area had an ineffective tangle of “express” services that ran just a few trips a day, and that were highly specialized around certain employers even though there wasn’t much ridership.  The place replaced them with a simple pattern of a half-hourly service all the way from Akron to Southgate (north off the map) which is a major hub for Cleveland RTA services.  The half-hourly service splits into two hourly strands in the rural area, to cover more territory, but converges at both ends to provide 30 minute frequency where demand is higher, and to provide 30-minute frequency all the way from Akron to Southgate.  Our analysis of outcomes at the time showed that the Reimagined network would be immensely more useful in connecting people in Akron and Summit County to the places they need to go. In 45 minutes or less:
  • The average county resident would be able to reach 60% more jobs using transit.
  • The average person of color would be able to reach 88% more jobs using transit.
  • The average low-income person would be able to reach 103% more jobs (more than double!) using transit.

Major activity centers and destinations, such as Summa Hospital, saw even greater increases in access to people and jobs in the region. The isochrone example below shows how the new network increased the number of people who could reach the hospital in 45 minutes by 77%. These kinds of access gains are the reason we knew that this new network would improve ridership relative to the previous network.

The Metro Board approved the Transit Development Plan in March 2022 and Akron METRO implemented the new network in June 2023. Ridership increased 24% in the first year after the network launched. As of July 2025, ridership was up around 40% compared to the year before the new network.  (In our introductory post we cite a different figure because those figures are standardized to the period December 2022 to July 2025, for comparison to other redesigns.)

The Reimagined network was a significant expansion, adding about 27% more service, but it was also a huge step in the direction of being useful to more people. It is much easier to achieve major gains with more service, yet the access outcomes improved far more than the additional investment would suggest, indicating that the new network didn’t just expand service, it drastically improved ridership potential.

On net, the total network productivity (ridership relative to service hours) is up about 9% compared to the year before the new network launched.  This is an extraordinary improvement in the context of overall trends in the industry.

The enormous improvements in ridership contributed to Akron METRO winning the 2025 APTA Outstanding Public Transportation System award for systems in the 3 million to 15 million annual riders category and the immense success was recently featured on the CBS Evening News: https://youtu.be/DNZnZJPvytU

We really enjoyed working with CEO Dawn Distler and the whole team at METRO.  This is a remarkable story about how much network redesign can improve people’s lives.

 

Our Bus Network Redesigns Are Increasing Ridership!

Posted on November 2, 2025 in Network Redesign 0

Amid all the gloomy headlines about transit funding crises, some transit agencies are reporting great news.  Our firm has been behind many bus network redesigns that are bringing more people onto public transit, especially in the US.  These plans have not just dramatically increased ridership.  They’ve even increased the productivity (ridership divided by service provided, or roughly, “bang for buck”).  That means more people using each bus, and more people benefiting from expanded access to opportunity.  Here are three of our most recent examples:

ROLLING 12-MONTH AVG.
DEC 2022 – JUN 2025		Implementation
Date		Ridership
Change*		Service Quantity
Change*		Productivity (Ridership/
Service Quantity) Change*
Akron METRO Regional Transit AuthorityJun ’2349%27%18%
Monterey-Salinas TransitDec ’2245%17%25%
Suffolk County TransitOct ’2344%22%18%
All Peer Agencies with Service Area Populations 250,000–1.5 million–26%10%15%

* Average for the 12 months ending June 2025 compared to the average for the 12 months ending Dec. 2022.

The last row shows how productivity grew nationwide in similar systems.  So clearly, much of the ridership growth might have happened anyway, but our redesigns all came in above that trendline, growing productivity more than the national average for peer systems.

This series of posts will provide deep-dives into some of these recent redesigns.  In each case, I don’t want to just brag about our firm’s achievements.  I want you to see why these were ridership-increasing projects, and why they contain insights that other agencies can use, especially if they are trying to achieve more with less.

For a long time, I’ve resisted providing high level summaries of ridership changes resulting from our work, for a few reasons:

  • Ridership is not the only goal of most transit agencies. The competing goal of coverage is important to almost all transit agency boards in the US, so we have never unequivocally pursued ridership as the only goal.  We encourage agencies to give us clear direction about what percentage of their service they want to devote to a ridership goal, but that’s never 100%.
  • Ridership is affected by the network design but also by many other things: fares, service quality, the economy, pandemics, etc. In many projects we’ve done, other things happened at the same time that make it hard to sort out which thing caused what ridership change.  For example, Alexandria, Virginia started free fares on the same day they started the new network.  Our San Jose, California redesign was implemented a month before the pandemic, so we only got one (promising) month of data.
  • We are most sure of the impact of a network redesign right after it’s implemented, before too many other things have happened, but we never see the full benefit then. It takes time for people to discover a new network and change their routines.   Benefits that arise from better serving existing travel patterns mostly show up within a year, but there are two other benefits of network design that take years to appear:  (1).  People relocate in response to better service, and (2) actual development may occur in response to the redesign, especially because of policies that permit more density around service of a certain frequency.  Those longer-term benefits are even harder to attribute to the network design as opposed to other things, because after more time, more other things have happened that also affect ridership.

So attributing the causes of ridership is always messy.  We like to talk instead about expanding access to opportunity, because that explains why a network redesign improves ridership in most cases.  So in the series of posts to come, we won’t just brag about our ridership numbers; we’ll look at exactly what each redesign did to produce that outcome, and what difficult tradeoffs were required.

Links to the individual articles are below.  This post will be updated as we get more data.

(Thanks to Alex Boccon-Gibod of JWA for the peer analysis.)

 

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:

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.

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