This week in transit: New ridership numbers, national recognition, and park-and-rides

AROUND THE REGION

New systemwide GRTC ridership numbers through the week of May 19th (PDF) are out and available for you to download. So far this year, the entire system has seen about 7.8 million rides compared to just 6.7 million last year—and they’ve still got June’s numbers to run. Also, at 6,908 average weekday rides, the Pulse has nearly doubled the initial ridership projections of 3,500. Wow!

Check it out: More national media coverage on the success of the Pulse! GRTC’s Garland Williams talks to NPR’s Here & Now about how Richmond’s new BRT and redesigned bus network resulted in a 17% increase in bus ridership. Across America, transit ridership is on the decline, so it’s exciting to see other cities learning from Richmond’s success. One quibble: Williams doesn’t think we’ll see more dedicated bus lanes in Richmond. There are, in fact, a bunch of streets where the City could install dedicated lanes to speed up bus services and make public transportation faster, cheaper to run, and more competitive with folks who choose to drive personal vehicles. To name a few: E. Main Street, W. Main Street, W. Cary Street, 14th Street, Chamberlayne Avenue, and Hull Street—and that’s just in the city. If we want to make public transportation an easy and reliable way to get around—whether you have a car or not—we’ve got to start prioritizing it over personal vehicles.

ELSEWHERE

A frequent complaint about our region’s existing public transit system is the lack of park-and-rides specifically for the Pulse (park-and-rides exist for some of GRTC’s express buses). Charleston, South Carolina is working on their own rapid transit improvements and part of that includes a park-and-ride study. That’s maybe something Henrico County should consider on both the eastern and western ends of the Pulse line.

Oklahomans are stoked on public transportation! Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma!

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: The future is fast, frequent, reliable public transportation

TAKE ACTION

Jim McConnell at the Chesterfield Observer has some new details about the County’s investment in and around the Route 1 corridor as part of the Northern Jefferson Davis Special Area Plan. You’ll remember that plan as the one that strongly encouraged running public transportation along Route 1, which then ultimately lead to the County applying for and winning a state grant to help fund bus service over the next two years (renewable for a third year!).

It’s great progress for Chesterfield, and you can see how including public transportation in a special area plan can lead to great things—or at least make the advocacy work for great things easier. That’s why it’s important to get bus service similarly included in the Midlothian Community Special Area Plan. This plan anemically mentions our region’s transit vision plan just once but doesn’t even recommend bus service down Midlothian. If you’d like to see more full-throated support of public transportation in the Midlothian Community Special Area Plan, please let either the Planning Department or Supervisor Haley know.

AROUND THE REGION

Check out this Letter to the Editor from GRTC Vice Chairman Ben Campbell about the improvements the bus company has seen since the opening of the Pulse and the redesign of the bus network. Campbell hits on something we talk about frequently: The Richmond region has underinvested in transit for decades. In fact, the region spends less per-capita on public transportation than almost all of its peer cities. Until the entire region decides to fund transit at a more acceptable level—and/or finds a regional dedicated funding stream—we will always be playing transit catch up.

ELSEWHERE

Here’s a fascinating new report out of the Shared-Use Mobility Center about how transit agencies partnering with Uber isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (PDF). TransitCenter has a summary of the report, but this gets to the heart of it: “But the results from Pinellas County indicate that subsidizing car trips is fundamentally limited as a complement to fixed-route service, and that even in small-scale applications, it may not be an efficient use of scarce agency resources...The future of transit isn’t a $5 discount on Uber trips. It’s fast, frequent, reliable fixed-route service that gets people where they want to go.”

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: Let’s get some buses on Midlothian Turnpike in Chesterfield County

TAKE ACTION

In Chesterfield County, the draft Midlothian Special Area Plan is out, and, if you’re a Chesterfield resident, it is ready for your comments. There’s not much in the way of public transportation in this plan, and that’s unfortunate for folks who want to age in place, can’t drive (or afford) a car, or would just like more options to get around than driving single-occupancy vehicles everywhere. The plan does acknowledge that a regional vision for public transportation exists and that it suggests running high-quality bus service down Midlothian Turnpike out to Westchester Commons. However, the special area plan stops short of actually recommending any sort of bus service on the corridor at all. That’s a bummer.

So! If you would like to see a more thoughtful inclusion of public transportation in the Midlothian Special Area Plan you can contact either the planning department or Midlothian District Supervisor Leslie Haley. Maybe say something along the lines of: “Please include more public transportation along Midlothian Turnpike in the Midlothian Special Area Plan—specifically GRTC bus service from the City line out to Westchester Commons as recommended by the Greater RVA Transit Vision Plan.”

Remember! We worked hard to get more more public transportation service included in the Northern Jefferson Davis Special Area Plan, and, as you’ll see below, that turned in to actual, factual bus service coming to the County later this year.

AROUND THE REGION

This past Tuesday the region celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Pulse and redesign of Richmond’s entire bus network. Adding to the celebration, ITDP, the international group charged with scoring and ranking bus rapid transit systems worldwide, popped in to town to award the Pulse a bronze ranking (PDF). This is a big deal! Zero cities in America have achieved a gold ranking and just two have achieved silver. The region did a good job following internationally-recognized best practices and built a high-quality piece of transit infrastructure. High-fives all around! NBC12 has a recap of the award presentation event, and you can read the Greater Washington Partnership’s one-year-later analysis of the Pulse and the new bus network (PDF). Two key takeaways from the latter: Ridership has increased 17% in Richmond compared to a 2% decline nationally, and our “leaders should continue to build out the comprehensive transit network...in order to ensure that all residents of the region have access to economic opportunity.”

Speaking of, here’s some good news on one of the pieces of that comprehensive transit network: The Commonwealth Transportation Board approved funding for bus service in Chesterfield County along Route 1! GRTC and the County are working out the details as we speak and should have buses on the ground as early as spring 2020. This has been a long time coming and is, fingers crossed, just the first expansion of public transportation we’ll see in Chesterfield.

RVA Rapid Transit board member and executive director of Virginians for High Speed Rail Danny Plaugher has a column in the paper on how Virginia is taking big steps on passenger rail and now needs the federal government to do their part.

ELSEWHERE

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that 1,500 residents of public housing will receive free unlimited transit passes. The spokesperson for their housing authority said, “The majority of our residents are people with very low incomes and they’re often making very difficult choices about what to spend what little money they have on. What may seem like a small amount of bus fare to us may cause them to think twice about going to the doctor or going to see a relative.“ The program is funded with $1 million from a voter-approved Transportation Benefit District.

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: Can you believe it? It’s been a year!

TAKE ACTION

This coming Tuesday at the ICA (601 W. Broad Street) from 8:00–9:45 AM, join us, Chamber RVA, and the folks from the Greater Washington Partnership to celebrate all of the transportation success Richmond has seen over the last 12 months. You can expect breakfast, an opportunity to have some transit chats, remarks by VCU President Rao, and a panel featuring the Mayor, Jennifer Mitchell (from the Department of Rail and Public Transportation), and Gary Armstrong (from the GRTC Board of Directors).

The event is free and open to the public, but please RSVP so we have an idea of headcount. See y’all there!

AROUND THE REGION

Can you believe it? This coming Monday is the one-year anniversary of the Pulse and the entire redesign of Richmond’s bus network. Since then we’ve seen ridership increase, VCU buy into the system, new fare payment options, bus service expansion in Henrico County, additional money for transit in the Mayor’s budget, and hints of public transportation coming to Chesterfield County. That’s a lot of transit progress, and we have a lot of transit momentum—which is great, because there’s still a ton of work left to do. You can read GRTC’s anniversary press release here which has some neat stats and facts about the Pulse one year later.

This past week, the folks who redesigned Richmond’s bus network released a memo detailing errors in methodology and calculations in a report put out by VCU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (PDF). The original report claimed, among other things, that after the redesign 22% fewer lower-income dwelling units were within 1/4 mile of a bus stop. The new memo found that only 2% fewer lower-income dwelling units were within 1/4 mile of a bus stop—and, of course, good public transportation is about more than proximity to a bus stop. In fact, the memo notes that, with the new bus network, the average resident can access 6% more jobs in 45 minutes while the average lower-income resident can access 10% more jobs in that same time period. You can read a bit more about the memo, the original report, and GRTC’s response over on the RVA Rapid Transit website.

Earlier this month, the Richmond Free Press ran a Letter to the Editor asking for all GRTC stops to have benches (and other amenities) installed (see below for some more thoughts on that!). This past week, RVA Rapid Transit boardmember Nicholas Smith wrote a follow up Letter to the Editor about how if we want more amenities at more bus stops—which, of course we do—we need to ask our elected officials across the region for more money for more bus stops.

ELSEWHERE

An analysis out of Wayne State University looked at the distribution of bus stop shelters across Detroit’s bus network and found that better placing the shelters could “roughly double the amount of time bus riders in Detroit spent in sheltered waiting environments daily, from 63,000 minutes a day to about 111,000.“ In fact, “by moving existing bus shelters to better-used stops, the Detroit Department of Transportation could increase the number of people who have access to shelters by 817 percent.” Whoa. After Richmond’s bus network redesign, I’d love to see a similar look (additionally taking into account race and income) at where bus stop amenities exist now and where they’re most needed.

—Ross Catrow