Piloting Low-Cost Transit Service Enhancements Through Agency Collaboration

In 2011, the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA); and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) launched the Route 47 Service Enhancement Pilot Project. This project was conceived within the framework of the Transit First Committee. The pilot presented an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of low-cost operational initiatives that might have the ability to improve transit services in dense, urban environments. These strategies included bus stop consolidation, farside stop placement, and the switch from a time point-based scheduling system to a headway-based scheduling system. This joint initiative served as a test of the potential to build community support for a pilot, the impact of the interventions themselves, and the ability of the Transit First Committee to work together collaboratively. Although the pilot initiative did not deliver the time savings expected, the process provided important lessons for the city, SEPTA, and DVRPC that are applicable for other transit agencies operating in similar geographic, political, and economic environments. The results of the collaborative process necessary to get the pilot in motion helped to reconnect the city and SEPTA after years of distrust and discord. The initiatives piloted were scrutinized through data analysis, which provided not only an understanding of the impacts but also an awareness of operational performance issues. Ultimately, this extensive data analysis supported decision making, fostered agreement between stakeholders, and developed trust within the community

Dots & Dashes: Transit Planning Outreach and Education in a Board Game Format

Dots & Dashes is a program that condenses the long-range public transit planning process, with its financial constraints, trade-offs, and land use considerations, into an outreach activity (a board game) appropriate for a range of stakeholder audiences from lay citizens to transportation professionals. By playing Dots & Dashes, stakeholders express their preferences for public transit investments and are educated about the planning process through group negotiation. Dots & Dashes was designed as a self-contained and branded package that would be replicable by planners in other regions. In the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) region, the program’s aggregated results inform DVRPC’s long-range plan as well as a new long-range vision for transit. Dots & Dashes was designed to be transferable for application in other cities and regions. In the simplest terms, planners interested in replicating the exercise need only adjust the scale of the game board and game pieces to match the local area and scale costs as necessary to account for different time horizons or local project costs

Defining a Primary Market and Estimating Demand for Major Bicycle-Sharing Program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Public bicycle-sharing (bike share) programs have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly in Europe, with a number of cities recently implementing systems and high levels of usage. North American efforts have been more limited to date, with high-profile recent examples including a small program in Washington, D.C., and a substantial seasonal program in Montreal, Canada. Because there are no established large-scale programs in the United States, planners exploring potential system designs and feasibilities are faced with an unusual degree of uncertainty about who would ride, where they might ride, and how often they might ride. A large-scale bike share system is under consideration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This paper discusses the methods and findings of a two-phase project that (a) used a raster-based geographic information system analysis to identify a primary geographic market area for a bike share program and (b) applied bike share trip diversion rates observed in peer European cities to estimate daily bike share trips in the primary market area. This analysis resulted in estimates for daily usage in Philadelphia that ranged from roughly 6,000 to 23,000 for two scales of market area and three demand scenarios (low, middle, and high). As bike share systems continue to proliferate in different settings, new data can refine the methods used here to provide increasing levels of certainty in the future

Transit Score: Screening Model for Evaluating Community Suitability for Transit Investments

The transit score is a measure that can inform the selection of appropriate transit investments for a given community. The model estimates a measure of the potential for success of various transit investments—the transit score—as a function of the densities of population, employment, and carless households. A version of this methodology was developed in 1989 by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), the metropolitan planning organization for the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden–Trenton, New Jersey, region. The method was adapted and expanded by the New Jersey Transit Corporation (NJ TRANSIT) in 2000 to evaluate future rail and fixed guideway extensions in its 2020 plan. Several other versions of the transit score methodology are known to exist and have been applied in studies across the United States. In 2005, DVRPC staff, in collaboration with NJ TRANSIT, undertook a project to validate and apply the transit score methodology to areas within the DVRPC region. Three versions of the transit score model were calibrated with linear regression models by using observed transit journey-to-work mode share as a proxy for transit score. Development of the transit score model is documented, revisions and statistical validation are described, and a range of applications of the transit score, both completed and contemplated, are discussed