Balancing Ridership vs. Coverage: Best Practices from Silicon Valley, CA

Jay Tyree from VTA in Santa Clara, CA, describes how Remix has democratized the ridership vs. coverage tradeoff of their current COA.

VTA, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, is in the midst of planning its first major service change in almost 10 years. Jay Tyree, service planner at VTA, sees the core challenge of the network redesign as a tradeoff between ridership and coverage: Should VTA maximize for ridership with frequent, all day service in only the densest areas? Or should they aim for wider coverage throughout the service area with less frequent service?

VTA is exploring three ridership vs. coverage scenarios to answer common questions about the bus network.

In his talk at this year’s Remix Conference, Tyree discusses how VTA has used Remix to democratize the decision process by arming the public with the information they need to understand the underlying give-and-take. Using Remix’s simple visualizations to clearly communicate the core problem during public outreach, VTA is moving away from the technique Tyree describes as “trust us, we’re service planners.”

You can watch his talk here: