Planning Better Public Transit In Upstate New York
Compact, walkable towns, low-density suburbs, and ranges of rural land compose the Capital District Transportation Authority’s service area, from Albany to Schenectady to Troy — all neatly arranged about 15 miles from each other, with Saratoga some 25 miles further north. CDTA’s fixed-route service through upstate New York is an interconnector, and the agency has used Remix to evaluate service changes and restructure routes.
Chad Heid, CDTA’s manager of scheduling, is heading up efforts concentrated around Saratoga Springs, which is connected to Schenectady by one well-used line, Route #50. As with any quality route restructuring process, he’s assessing where service currently meets demand and where it’s falling short of the agency’s expectations for productivity, as well as riders’ expectations for travel times, frequencies, and coverage. Remix’s demographic layers have helped him explain to riders how CDTA makes its decisions.
We’ve found Remix to be really productive for our purposes in using all the mapping layers, because people will make comparisons about neighborhoods and we’re able to pull up the data with Remix much more efficiently than without the program.
“Saratoga is a smaller community, but also is a well-educated community, and the public outreach component of the restructuring effort has involved many public officials and knowledgeable citizens who understand the value of asking good questions to a transit agency when they’re looking to deploy services,” Chad says. “We’ve found Remix to be really productive for our purposes in using all the mapping layers, because people will make comparisons about neighborhoods and we’re able to pull up the data with Remix much more efficiently than without the program. All of those layers have helped to inform our process of meeting the route service to where more transit-dependent populations are.”
Chad has also employed Jane throughout the outreach process. Though it took him three or four times at different meetings to explain it succinctly, he says that the lightbulb ultimately went off for his audience: They were able to say, “I live right in the middle of that dot, right next to where Jane was, and I see how much further I can now travel as opposed to the old plan.”
CDTA will implement its route restructuring in May. Meanwhile, the CDTA planning team has also been using Remix to create iterations of routes. Seeing ridership and demographic information change instantly as a result of new frequency inputs is a huge time-saver for CDTA, which only has two staffers dedicated to scheduling and service planning and three to strategic, long-range planning.
We each wear a lot of different hats, and having Remix in our toolbox helps to generate a lot of these maps much faster, and has certainly helped our process in presenting information to public officials and citizens at large
“We each wear a lot of different hats, and having Remix in our toolbox helps to generate a lot of these maps much faster, and has certainly helped our process in presenting information to public officials and citizens at large,” Chad says. CDTA’s GIS scheduling system administrator has found it easiest and most aesthetically pleasing to build maps in Remix, thanks to its snap-to feature for routing, and exports shapefiles to make publicly available route maps.
For an agency like CDTA, which operates a mix of services, Remix has led to more nimble planning processes that are easy for its riders to understand. “I am a very strong advocate for leveraging technology in our small planning office. It certainly helps us to generate lots of productive output,” says Chad. “That requires a little investment in technology.”
