The North American Transit Trifecta

Back in my transit days, I worked with all kinds of diversity. It was truly great: bus riders that were old and young, educated or not, eco-conscious or thrifty, poor or otherwise, all in various mental states. It was truly a pleasure and one where I found myself continuously in my element while at the same time being on the edge of my seat in preparation for the unexpected all at once. Then, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the recession hit. It was time to cut transit service.

How can such a thing be accomplished? What goes and what stays? Countless late-night meetings, public input sessions, and comment database entries later, a decision had to be reached to plug a growing financial gap from a deep recession.

The pyramid of  transit in North America

"We should cut the hours of Bus 10, because it's redundant." "Let's reroute the Buses 11 and 12 to cover the areas of the 10 that we lost." "Let's eliminate the 14 - no one ever rides it anyway." All of these are examples of the priorities that an agency with a limited pot of money can choose to allocate its resources to.

Coverage:

Question: Do we want to serve as many places as possible, even if the frequency is poor?

Example: Should we operate buses on rural routes?

Ridership:

Question: Do we want to make sure that the areas with demonstrated demand are adequately served?

Example: Should major corridors remain at high frequency, possibly with limited, express, or skip-stop service?

Need: 

Question: Do we want those with mobility challenges or those with an economic disadvantage to have fair, equal, and/or adequate access to service?

Example: Should a bus detour to serve a large retirement community, even if it adds time to a schedule and/or ridership is not high?

There are no right answers here

These questions are ethical and morale decisions that all agencies face. The answer is clearly "Yes!" to all of them, but no agency is able to provide a ridership-based, need-responsive, wide-coverage area of service on a budget. In the perfect world, a transit provider would be able to say to its government, "This tram, bus, or train is full. We should add another..." but this isn't always the case. And so, we must compromise and hash out our values.

Perhaps your agency, whether it be a board of directors, citizen committee, or otherwise, chooses to weigh its service 20/20/60. 20% of the service budget for Coverage and Ridership, 60% for Need. Or, to put it another way, $60 of every $100 of service will be designed to serve those with the greatest need for transit.

Perhaps you prefer something else; maybe you'd like to maximize ridership and therefore you focus on core corridors with no deviations and a frequent, skip-stop, 24-hour service: A real 10/80/10 breakdown.

A real agency would never have something as extreme as 100/0/0 (maximum Coverage), because that would mean something crazy like one bus, once per day, down every single road in the entire metropolitan area: truly maximum coverage.

There is no good ending when transit service is cut. At the end of the day, no one was happy with the decisions that were made.

So, what are your values?