Jarrett Walker's summary of the recently redeveloped bus network in Miami, FL. The new network increases the network's catchment area by about 30%. The new design also pivots from historically...
Jarrett Walker's summary of the recently redeveloped bus network in Miami, FL. The new network increases the network's catchment area by about 30%. The new design also pivots from historically commuter-focused timetables toward more polycentric schedules that reflect the modern day's greater variety of rider personas and trip types. Here is the new map, and here is a graphic showing how many more people have good access to transit.
The important takeaway here is that careful architectures for route planning and scheduling can have a major impact on the effectiveness of a region's transit without necessarily costing billions of dollars. While they can't offer the same capacity per vehicle as light or heavy rail, buses are still an essential part of every city's transit network. Buses serve the areas that trains almost necessarily cannot go, and ensuring that your city's bus network is strong is a boon to transit agencies. We do need to spend money on subways, light rail, and regional rail—but buses are right up there too. Good on Miami for taking some initiative here!
With the new design, a frequent grid will cover large parts of the county with huge benefits. The simplest measure of that improvement is how many people or jobs are near service. The chart below shows the change in residents or jobs near service by the frequency of service at midday on weekdays. The number of residents who live 15-minute from frequent transit will increase from 380,000 (14% of the County’s residents) to 814,00 (30%) during weekday service. The new network will bring frequent service near almost 60% of households without cars; that’s 20,000 additional households without cars near more frequent service. And jobs near frequent service will increase from 29% to 43% on weekdays.
We can measure this exact thing over and over again across the whole county and when we summarize the results we find that the average resident will be able to get to 28% more jobs (or other useful destinations) in 45 minutes. The benefit is even greater for lower-income residents and people of color. That means more people, when they look up a trip they might make, will find that the travel time is reasonable. For more on why we use this measure, see here.
The other big improvement in this new network is a major increase in frequency of service on weekends. Across the country, we’ve worked on network plans that have increased service on evenings and weekends and they’ve often shown huge ridership gains. People value flexibility and spontaneity. Everyone wants the ability to get home outside of the traditional 8-to-5 workday. Critically, though, people working in retail or restaurant jobs often need to work on weekends. A route that runs infrequently on the weekends is missing the peak time for people in these industries, and there are many, many people in these industries in Miami-Dade.
Some residents of Miami-Dade County are still not served adequately by public transit. This redesign is a big deal for the area, but more work can be done. Installing more dedicated bus-only lanes, as well as studying routes for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes, can have a meaningful impact on service. Additionally, camera-based enforcement of existing bus lanes, like Philadelphia's recent initiative to ticket cars parked in bus lanes, can significantly reduce congestion and travel times. Walker has also written about some of the intricacies of inter-modal scheduling, or syncing up train schedules with bus schedules (spoiler: it's not easy, but still worth investigating).
If your city lacks sufficient public transportation, or if its bus networks do not effectively transport people to where they actually want to go, contact your representatives in local government. Link them to Walker's blogs and others like it (he's a professional transit consultant and might be useful to them beyond the literal content of the blog...). Ask them to make changes to outdated scheduling patterns, ask them to install dedicated bus lanes (with enforcement), and ask them to take inspiration from other cities that have done these things successfully. Ask them to request funding from the state and federal government to facilitate infrastructure upgrades: they can apply for many different kinds of grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law!
Jarrett Walker's summary of the recently redeveloped bus network in Miami, FL. The new network increases the network's catchment area by about 30%. The new design also pivots from historically commuter-focused timetables toward more polycentric schedules that reflect the modern day's greater variety of rider personas and trip types. Here is the new map, and here is a graphic showing how many more people have good access to transit.
The important takeaway here is that careful architectures for route planning and scheduling can have a major impact on the effectiveness of a region's transit without necessarily costing billions of dollars. While they can't offer the same capacity per vehicle as light or heavy rail, buses are still an essential part of every city's transit network. Buses serve the areas that trains almost necessarily cannot go, and ensuring that your city's bus network is strong is a boon to transit agencies. We do need to spend money on subways, light rail, and regional rail—but buses are right up there too. Good on Miami for taking some initiative here!
Some residents of Miami-Dade County are still not served adequately by public transit. This redesign is a big deal for the area, but more work can be done. Installing more dedicated bus-only lanes, as well as studying routes for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes, can have a meaningful impact on service. Additionally, camera-based enforcement of existing bus lanes, like Philadelphia's recent initiative to ticket cars parked in bus lanes, can significantly reduce congestion and travel times. Walker has also written about some of the intricacies of inter-modal scheduling, or syncing up train schedules with bus schedules (spoiler: it's not easy, but still worth investigating).
If your city lacks sufficient public transportation, or if its bus networks do not effectively transport people to where they actually want to go, contact your representatives in local government. Link them to Walker's blogs and others like it (he's a professional transit consultant and might be useful to them beyond the literal content of the blog...). Ask them to make changes to outdated scheduling patterns, ask them to install dedicated bus lanes (with enforcement), and ask them to take inspiration from other cities that have done these things successfully. Ask them to request funding from the state and federal government to facilitate infrastructure upgrades: they can apply for many different kinds of grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law!