Transportation Analysis
Modes, views, and favorite solutions for transit
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How Analysis Posts Work
In our analysis, we take a deeper look at our survey results and highlight the patterns and insights we find under the surface using segmentation across meaningful demographics (like age, gender, or location).
But when you slice the data like that, you need to be careful that you don’t have too few responses in each group. You don’t want to draw the wrong interpretations because the few you got were from weirdos (😜).
That’s why our rule of thumb is that we won’t do any segmentation with <50 responses in a survey. With your help spreading the word about us, we can grow to the point where we always have enough.
But we’re not going to leave you hanging either. When we don’t have enough responses for segmentation, we’ll still provide our take on the overall results. They’re still fascinating! And we’re happy to theorize with you. 🤔
And now, to the main event…
Public Transit
Boise’s growing. That’s put a strain on affordable housing, and it certainly strains our roads. Everyone knows that from traffic and parking. Public transportation’s supposed to help with that, so we wanted to know what people think on the topic.
In this week’s survey, we looked into transit, and the survey, results and group discussion recording are here. Below’s what we found most interesting —
Short distance drivers

Most of the people we heard from drive primarily, though we had a fair amount of bikers. Good context for the rest of the results — these aren’t folks that are using transit most of the time.

And most of them don’t have long commutes. With that in mind, when a lot of them chose a Treasure Valley train solution, they’re probably wanting other people to use it than them. Our discussion group touched on that here.
They’re unimpressed, wannabe riders

Our transit system didn’t get high marks from our respondents. Translation: most people think “so so” or worse.

But most of our respondents said that they’d like to use transit several times a week, at least in theory. The reason I asked that was to see if we had a bunch of people that wanted to complain about transit, but never actually see themselves using it. Apparently not!
What should we do?

When we shifted to possible solutions to public transit challenges, the most popular choices were a train and buses more often. This train thing is what our group found interesting. Since most of our respondents have short commutes, we think they want other people to ride it.

Another surprising result was how supportive our respondents were of prioritizing transit over cars. We’re used to hearing people moaning about less space for cars, but these people seemed to support that. We discussed whether we have a different audience we’re talking to, but also how that prioritization doesn’t need to mean worse traffic.
Will they vote?

Ok, so we have some good ideas for solutions, but these all take more money (some take A LOT more). And we talked about how funding is a major issue. The question is, will people vote based on transit improvements? The short answer appears to be yes, but it’s not the top issue for most of our respondents.
Segmentation Ideas
As we mentioned at the beginning, we don’t do segmentation unless we have 50 or more responses at analysis time. Since we have 49 right now, we’re skipping it. (Remember, you can help us get more responses by joining and inviting others.)
If we had more responses, these are the things I’d want to check:
- Politics. Seems like liberals typically support public transit more often than conservatives. Wondering if that’s true for our group.
- Income. I’m guessing wealthier people use transit less, because cost isn’t as big of a factor. But, convenience is still big (like parking), so maybe this wouldn’t be clearcut.
- Environment. Wondering if people that care a lot about environmental impact are more pro-transit. I’d assume so.
Interesting Comments
There were a lot of interesting comments, as usual. I’ve highlighted several that I think are interesting. Instead of commenting on all of them, I decided to emoji-fy my reactions. (😜)
Too much attention:
Downtown trolley car/whatever Bieter wants. We need to improve options to get TO downtown first. (🌶)
That they should be able to drive a private car without any delays at any hour of the day. (😒)
Freeway expansions, general complaining about traffic without advocating for public transit, stereotyping transit as gross. Advocating for a rail system before investing more in our buses. A rail system isn’t good without a viable bus system to supplement it.(😠)
Not enough attention:
I would be willing to pay 5 cents more per gallon year round of it would be spent locally to improve things. Right now, especially in past 9 months, traffic has gotten considerably more heavy in downtown Boise and that’s even after construction lanes have come down. All the infill of urban residential is great but it is loading up the bandwidth. State Street construction has offloaded traffic to Chinden horribly. (🤑)
Public transportation. I hear it mentioned a lot but nothing is happening so we must not be paying enough attention to it yet. (😞)
The need for a dedicated, sustained, and predictable funding source. Farebox return is/has not been a viable way to run a transit system in the US. Additional funding is needed and that needs to be guaranteed. Our system right now largely exists due to the charity of the City of Boise, which could change based on an election. One solution is a local option tax. Utah has done this to great effect.(🧐)
The high cost of public transportation and the fact that only Boise city seems to be paying. Outlying communities pay in very little by comparison. (😒)
People seem to forget the Catch 22 about buses: More riders would mean more busses, but ValleyRide won’t justify more busses without more riders. I strongly support the local tax option: Let the voters decide on a sales tax increase to support more public transportation. I’d vote Yes in a heartbeat! (🤓)
That’s all folks!
If you want more analysis goodness, check out our other posts at the Analysis section.

Don’t buy it? Make it better
We’re working to figure out what people really think. If you ever read our stuff and don’t believe the results, you could be right — maybe we aren’t hearing from enough people with different views.
If that’s what you think, help us get closer by joining and weighing in yourself, and ask your friends and family to do it too. The more people participate, the better the results will be.

