Here's how Houston boosted mass transit ridership by improving service without spending a dime
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10852884/houston-bus-ridership
Last year, Houston took a stab at doing something that sounds too good to be true — drastically improving its mass transit system by redoing the way its bus routes work, without spending a dime of extra money. Early results are now in, and it appears to be working. Bus ridership is up 4 percent on local routes and up 6 percent on park-and-ride routes — even as the city adds two new light rail lines (this part, obviously, did cost money) and ridership surges on the existing light rail red line.
That's all good news for Houston, but what's especially encouraging is that the playbook the Texas city followed is broadly applicable to a wide range of American cities. Houston doesn't have the world's best fundamentals for bus ridership in terms of weather or the nature of the built environment, but its success shows that, fundamentally, the quality and design of the system matters.
If other cities work to make their systems more useful, they, too, can expect more riders. And with more riders should come more revenue and more long-term political support for even more improvements.
The basic philosophy behind Houston's reform is simple. Rather than run a large number of low-frequency bus routes that look good on a map, concentrate vehicles on a smaller number of high-demand routes. This ensures that buses arrive frequently on the routes that riders are most likely to want to take. The result is a system that has fewer bus routes overall but a much richer network of frequent bus routes, where a person can show up at a station and wait for the next bus without consulting a schedule in advance.
Hmmm. I'll bet a lot of people suddenly find themselves in transit deserts. And I certainly hope there aren't any gaps in the paratransit network, which extends 3/4 mile on either side of a bus or light rail route.
= new reply since forum marked as read
