Why You Should Be Bullish on Cap Remap
Cap Remap is here, and if the immediate buzz on social media is any indication, few Austinites are happy about the changes. Mostly, everyone’s complaining about longer walks, more transfers, and lost access to certain destinations.
Farm and City gave Remap a thumbs-up. Their analysis shows that low-income residents will gain access to vastly more frequent transit service, which is a good thing, in the abstract.
Mike Dahmus and various other residents along the old Route 5 are not happy about that route’s elimination.
Jack Craver has the most balanced opinion, which amounts to a lukewarm “the new bus routes are probably better.”
Here’s my take.
Judged by ridership alone, Remap is likely to succeed. I predict that Capital Metro’s total system ridership will hold steady. In the best case, it will increase slightly.
Maintaining the ridership we already have may not sound like a very lofty goal, but arresting Cap Metro’s multi-year plunge — in the context of a national drop in transit ridership in the vast majority of American cities — would be an accomplishment in and of itself.
Okay, I know what the native Austinites are thinking: Cap Metro said the Red Line would be amazing, but it sucked. They said MetroRapid would be amazing, but it sucked — or at least fell far short of its promises that it would be “just like urban rail.” So why on earth, Mr. Californian, should we give Cap Metro’s latest pet project the benefit of the doubt?
The principles underlying grid redesigns like Remap, as espoused by Jarrett Walker and the new wave of transit planners, are that frequency is freedom, and convenient transfers enable access to vastly more destinations.
Frequency is very valuable in urban transit markets because at a certain threshold of service — about every 10–15 minutes or better — you can confidently use transit without being beholden to a schedule. This has ripple effects as people start using transit for spontaneous “urban” trips like shopping, errands, and leisure, in addition to the 9–5 work commutes that people make less often.
Transfers between transit lines, despite their negative stigma, are very valuable in combination with high frequency. A single transit line enables you to reach only the destinations along that line, but if you’re willing to transfer to another service, you’re now able to reach destinations along both lines. Therefore, if your goal is to provide abundant amounts of attractive transit service to widely dispersed destinations, transit planners really like frequency, and they really like grids, which use crisscrossing trunk lines to serve lots of point-to-point trips in conjunction with convenient, minimum-wait transfers.
Power of the Grid
But is the grid the right solution for Austin?
Three years ago, Houston’s transit network moved to a grid design with much fanfare. The thinking was that a multi-destinational network would fit hand-in-glove with the very epitome of Texas suburban sprawl.
But Austin, Austinites are quick to reassure me, is special. Our city is shaped like a giant hourglass, and our north-south thoroughfares are bottlenecked by the Colorado River. The downtown-Capitol-UT central core is an extremely important activity center, and unlike the central business districts of other Texas cities, it was spared from disinvestment and destruction by freeway builders.
I don’t think Remap’s skeptics are overestimating the importance of the neighborhood-to-downtown transit market. They are, however, underestimating the importance of destinations away from the core.
Low-income residents in particular are not necessarily demanding transit to downtown offices. They’re trying to get to retail jobs a few subdivisions over. Or the Walmart down the road. And often at nontraditional hours, such as during mid-day, or on weekends. That’s why good off-peak and weekend service is such a big deal for all transit users, not just yuppies for whom living without a car is a choice, not a necessity.
How do I know this? Because we’ve already seen how the grid can work in Austin.
Frequency Can Work
In 2015, Cap Metro created a frequent service network by boosting the frequency of several bus routes, which was supposed to complement the MetroRapid system launched the previous year. This network was very limited, and it was only available on weekdays from 7am to 7pm.
Route 7 and the two MetroRapid lines were traditional neighborhood-to-downtown trunk lines, but the other local routes in this network were orbitals that didn’t serve downtown. The idea was to create a grid, however limited in scope.
Did it work?
Cap Metro claims they’ve seen ridership increases in the routes they’ve invested frequent service into, but the data show that’s only half-true. MetroRapid has seen significant increases thanks to increased frequency and the removal of premium fares — even if the 801 is still making up lost ground from an overall drop along the Guadalupe-Lamar corridor — but most of the other traditional MetroBus routes have been holding steady, or declining ever so slightly.
Keep in mind that ridership on the entire Cap Metro system has been falling even more precipitously. So, once again, a bus route that stays afloat is still bucking the trend.
We can extrapolate Remap’s consequences from this little experiment in frequent service. Better service and a grid redesign will attract riders, but keep your expectations modest — especially within the first year or so after the redesign, when ridership will inevitably enter a near-term drop. In particular, don’t interpret empty buses right now as a sign that Remap is an immediate failure; people need time to adjust to a new network. (The industry standard period is two years.)
Still, Remap’s vastly expanded frequent network has significant potential for ridership growth. The only problem is that it will be serving the city of Austin, Texas.
Austin, a Work in Progress
Our city is missing thousands of miles of sidewalks, and filling in the gaps would cost $1.6 billion that we don’t have — being a pedestrian in Austin is virtually a criminal act. Yet Remap is betting that Austinites will walk even further to reach transit.
Cap Metro’s ridership has proved surprisingly resilient, so far. People have responded positively to the additional frequency on MetroRapid and the deployment of the previous frequent network. But, understandably, transit riders have their limits. With some walks under the new network being upwards of half a mile, often along Austin’s busiest and least safe streets, quite a few Austinites will just throw up their arms and give up on transit.
So Remap is, to some extent, putting the cart before the horse. In a perfect world, the sidewalks would be there, the streets would be safe and sane, and the walk would be pleasant. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in right now in Austin. Simply put, we need more pedestrian infrastructure, from sidewalks to hybrid beacons to scramble crosswalks to some actual shade here and there.
That’s not to say there’s nothing Cap Metro can do. The agency made a grave error in placing some of its MetroRapid stations so that transfers from crosstown bus lines are unnecessarily difficult. Also, many bus stops are located mid-block, which makes it easier for bus drivers to make stops but forces pedestrians to jaywalk away from signalized crossings. Beyond just improving service, Cap Metro’s next step needs to be examining how the agency can improve the experience of walking to transit.
Cap Remap has me excited about the possibilities of the new frequent network. In fact, weekend service is now so much better that I predict significant increases in weekend ridership almost immediately, just as we saw in Houston. Unfortunately, on-the-ground realities make the new service philosophy difficult to swallow, which is why I think Cap Metro concentrated and straight-lined service a little too aggressively.
But Austin will get there, even if it takes decades. Like the city itself, Cap Metro’s new bus network is very much a work in progress. Someday, far into the future, Austin will have the world-class transit system it needs — and deserves.
