Design your own bus stop shelter...

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GRTC has released a survey that you can fill out to help them decide what our new bus stop shelters should look like. First, it’s excellent that we’re getting new shelters—the existing ones are...suboptimal. Second, the background to this is that GRTC had designs for new shelters in front of the City’s Urban Design Committee late last year and someone (someone who may or may not write a weekly email about transportation-related topics) submitted a comment that the chosen design looked dated and didn’t feel like part of the same transportation system as our fancy new Pulse Stations. GRTC pulled the paper from UDC (😬), and now we have this very thorough survey about what folks might want out of a bus stop shelter. Unsolicited opinion, should you decide to fill out this survey: Choose something modern, mostly glass, and as far away from anything that looks like it belongs in Colonial Williamsburg. Almost ten years ago San Francisco redesigned their bus top shelters to something modern, useful, and even solar-powered—we can do it, too!

AROUND THE REGION

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a story about GRTC missing their revenue projection by $1 million. Note that’s a revenue projection and that GRTC’s budget is still balanced. Regardless of what this means for the transit company moving forward, riders should not shoulder the burden of revenue shortfall through service cuts—it’s something to keep an eye on.

ELSEWHERE

TransitCenter has a good article about the reasons to decriminalize fare evasion. Richmond’s fare enforcement officers are not police officers, and if you are caught evading fare on the Pulse it is a not a criminal offense. This is good policy and should remain GRTC’s policy moving forward. Many studies have shown “that fare enforcement disproportionately targets black and brown people, and that people of color face harsher penalties when they are stopped.”

Also from TransitCenter, check out this Open Transit Data Toolkit. Are you interested in wrangling the data GRTC makes available into useful tools for the rest of us? This is an excellent resource to get you started.

The CEO of MARTA (Atlanta’s transit company), says he wants the region to spend $100 billion dollars over 40 years on transportation projects. The last sentence of that editorial is a good one: “To maximize a prosperous future that seems in the cards for this metro, we must be willing to dream and build aggressively toward it, we believe.”

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: A 21% ridership increase!

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Last week, the excellent Transit mobile app launched in Richmond, and you should go download it right now! The app does an incredible job at showing you the best ways to get around town by bus, walking, bike, or even RVA Bike Share, and gives you an easy-to-read list of different travel options sorted by trip length. It really is a game changer.

Note that the availability of the Transit app in Richmond is only possible because GRTC opened up to developers their bus scheduling and real-time data feeds. This was something we asked y’all to advocate for last year, and, now, you can see the impact of that advocacy! Good work!

AROUND THE REGION

There are very, very few cities in the United States that are seeing ridership increase on public transportation, but Richmond is now one of them. After several years of decline, bus ridership in Richmond is up 21%! That’s a huge percentage! When localities invest in better bus service, more people ride the bus. It’s a pretty straightforward formula that we should continue to follow.

This past week, the Henrico County board of supervisors hosted their annual retreat at which they talked a bit about public transportation. From the County’s Twitter account: “Henrico's focus on transit service will continue in 2019, with a study of Route 1 Brook Road Corridor; an assessment of Park-N-Ride express services; and shelter improvements.” It’s exciting to hear that Henrico won’t let their transit momentum stall and is already looking to expand upon their big-time services increases from last year. Also, because it’s fun to dream about the future, with the County’s interest in building a sports arena at the Richmond International Raceway one can imagine extending the #3 Highland Park route north to connect to Laburnum and increasing the frequency of the hourly #91 Laburnum Connector.

Over in the Virginia Mercury, Danny Plaugher from Virginians for High Speed Rail has a column about how landing Amazon can and should push the Commonwealth to build a modern transportation network.

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Does the proliferation of Uber and Lyft reduce car ownership? Survey says: Probably not. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and, as the author of this article says, to reduce those emissions we need to “continue to expand space-efficient and active transportation options...but it’s not some new form of ‘shared mobility.’ It’s frequent, reliable, safe, and comfortable public transportation.”

Gwinnett County, a suburb of Atlanta, has officially begun their campaign to join their regional transportation network. On March 19th, county residents will vote on a referendum to both join MARTA and levy a 1% sales tax to pay for a ton of transportation improvements. Check out the Go Gwinnett! advocacy website to learn more.

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: Chesterfield...Will they or won’t they?

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Will they or won’t they?? Will the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors decide to bring fixed-route GRTC service to Route 1? Will they pick an on-demand van service instead? Will they do nothing at all (something that Supervisors Winslow says “doesn’t seem to be an option”)? We’ll learn more this month as the County conducts a stakeholder survey of the Route 1 corridor and mulls over whether or not to apply for a state grant that would cover up to 80% of the operating costs for a public transportation pilot. Jim McConnell at the Chesterfield Observer has a great piece that should give you all the background information you need to know.

If you are a Chesterfield resident and you have thoughts on the County bringing public transportation to Route 1, please let your Supervisor know!

AROUND THE REGION

A reminder: GRTC will roll out a set of service updates today, January 6th. As part of these updates, the two Fulton routes—#4A and #4B—will have their frequencies reduced from 15-minutes to 30-minutes. This means that folks living in Fulton, who since this summer’s network redesign no longer have direct routes to Downtown, will have their average wait times doubled from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes. It’s always disappointing to see service cuts but especially so as Richmond’s new bus network is less than a year old.

WCVE has a short look at a new bus study out of VCU’s Wilder School Center for Urban and Regional Analysis. You can also download and read the full study (PDF). Something to keep in mind as you read through that PDF: Access to public transportation is about more than just proximity to a bus stop—it’s also about the usefulness of that transit. As we’re seeing in Fulton this weekend, folks’ distance to their bus stop remains unchanged, but, as the frequency has been halved, the number of places they can get to within one hour has certainly decreased. This means taking more time out of your day to get to work, school, doctor’s appointment, or your favorite local doughnut shop.

ELSEWHERE

As Pittsburgh plans its new BRT service, they’re thinking about improving access to the airport. Bus service to the Richmond airport is brand new and a pretty big service upgrade, but, dang, is it anything but fast. While a BRT to RIC probably isn’t in the cards any time soon, an express route to the airport might be something to consider. Typically, airport service doesn’t have the best ridership, but it does feel like an amenity that a growing city in 2019 just needs to provide. Seems like something folks in Richmond’s business/tourism/hotel industries would be interested in?

TransitCenter has their Best Worst Most of 2018 end-of-year transit review. Richmond gets a small shoutout.

Did you know there’s a tunneling trade publication? Did you know tunneling is up world wide 7%? This is all so very charming!

—Ross Catrow