04-26-2000 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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peak direction. These routes also have unproductive local "tails" covering neighborhoods with service that is too infrequent to be useful. • Service in low- density suburban areas fails to maximize convenience and efficiency. Service tends to be confusing, infrequent and limited by time of day. Some low- density areas have Dial -a -Ride service; other comparable areas do not. This shows a difference in local initiative rather than absence of regional strategy. Many low- density areas cannot support fixed -route service at any level of productivity. This plan proposes a new "Flex Route" system that offers improved service and replaces very highly subsidized Dial -a -Ride service. • Currently, transfers are difficult because most frequencies are poor and schedules at most transfer points are not coordinated for easy connections (Northtown is a notable exception). Adding convenient, fast and safe transfers can significantly improve travel times for many trips. The benefits of timed transfers are especially great for non - downtown oriented trips — suburb - to- suburb trips and local trips within a community, which currently are difficult to accomplish within a reasonable time. Hard Choices: The Stakeholder Process "What is transit for ?" Transit faces a painful tradeoff between pursuing ridership and minimizing subsidy per passenger (called the Productivity goal) and serving people who need transit wherever they are, regardless of what it costs (the Coverage goal). These goals imply totally different service designs, and the choice between them is purely a value judgment. Figure 1 on the following page depicts the Productivity and Coverage goals. At an all -day workshop in March 1999, staff posed this question to 45 local stakeholders who represented a cross - section of interests throughout the study area. Staff estimated that the existing system is about 60 percent justifiable by productivity and 40 percent justifiable by coverage. Stakeholders recommended that planners increase the focus on productivity by 10 percent, changing the service design ratio to 70 percent of service according to productivity and 30 percent to coverage. Page 246