Guest post by Andrae Griffith.
Andrae Griffith has a Bachelor’s Degree in Urban & Regional Planning and will complete an Advanced Diploma in Transportation Engineering Technology from Mohawk College (with Dean’s Honours Graduate designation) in April 2016. He has extensive experience in the transportation and transit profession. The report and the presentation are available online. To get in touch with him, please email andrae.griffith(at)gmail.com. He tweets @gttavisions.
Picture this… You’re a city with a proud history of making steel on the cusp of an exciting new chapter. You have a downtown core that companies are moving to, and you’ve got a tech sector and a network of hospitals to keep your economy diversified. You’ve positioned yourself as a place where families can afford a home in a nice urban neighbourhood and still be a short commuter train ride away from the metropolis. You have a burgeoning arts scene and an active community of urban activists who care deeply about your well-being. You’ve got two institutes of higher learning close to your downtown core, so there are plenty of riders to justify a better transit network than most of your neighbours have. You have some problems with sprawl on your edges, and you’re still not sure if you should plan for steel to come back or plan to redevelop those lands, but you’ve made some good planning decisions recently that deserve a pat on the back. Overall, you’re riding on a cloud of optimism that even the usual “this town is going to hell in a handbasket” crowd can no longer deny.
Oh, and did I mention that the provincial government is spending a billion dollars on LRT along your main street?
Hamilton, Ontario is a city of about 520,000 people a little over an hour west of Toronto by train. While it has the foundations of a good transit network for a city of its size, it hasn’t been as successful at growing bus ridership than some of its neighbours. While Brampton, where I grew up, saw an 80% increase in ridership between 2006 and 2012, Hamilton’s city-owned Hamilton Street Railway couldn’t even muster 3% growth over that same period. But, the opportunity is knocking. In May, the Ontario Government announced $1 billion in funding for a light rail transit line that will run along the busy King Street corridor from McMaster University to a district that is primed for redevelopment. It will also vindicate the visionaries who insisted that the transit company keep the name it adopted way back in the late 1870s.
My role in all of this came as part of the thesis-level Transportation Project for the Transportation Engineering Technology program at Mohawk College. One of the internships I had during my time at Mohawk was with TransLink in Vancouver, British Columbia with the bus service planning unit. Given the lessons, I learned out west, and given that the Hamilton LRT creates an opportunity to restructure the bus routes, I re-imagined the HSR as if it were planned by my former colleagues.
Baseline Conditions. It would have been easy to pull the total service hours from a council report, but Remix helped me understand where those numbers came from.
Future Conditions. The difference between fantasy map and professional product? Costing. Remix helped me stay on budget.
Remix played a central role in the project right from the start. I could have easily looked the present-day transit network costs in a city council report, but recreating the baseline network in Remix helped me cost in a transparent way that would be compatible with my future network’s costing model. Also, it helped give me insights into some of the decisions Hamilton’s transit planners had made. Drawing my new network was a breeze, but with a budget in mind, Remix made it easy to see where I could afford to extend a route to a better terminus (a key objective) and what reducing costs meant in terms of coverage and frequency. In the end, I was able to show that restructuring the bus routes according to TransLink’s philosophies would deliver a net benefit to riders and administrators. Coverage went up; connectivity was improved, and the fleet was used more efficiently. But, more importantly, I was able to show where to make specific investments to improve the network. Anyone can make a fantasy transit map, but Remix helped me turn that into something academic and professional.
In addition to coverage and connectivity, Remix made it easy to analyse where frequent transit service was provided. A route might only justify service every 60 minutes, but that simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Choice riders need high-quality service before they convert to transit, and captive riders shouldn’t be forced to live inflexible lives. Remix helped me show where the frequent transit corridors were, and that was important given that I was able to grow frequent transit coverage by 20%.
I’ve talked a lot about how Remix helped me do the analysis necessary to redraw Hamilton’s transit network, but presenting my findings was where the software really stole the show. Rather than put up static before-and-after maps onto slides I took my professors and classmates into the program and showcased a some of the changes I made. The interface made individual routes stand out, and I was able to isolate the routes I wanted to talk about with a few clicks. Having the an interactive presentation was a welcome change from lecturing about guiding principles and costing models. But, on top of all of that, my ace in the hole was the isochrones produced by the Jane feature.
I could have flipped between before and after maps to show route alignment changes, and I could have opened the frequency tables to show how my routes were running more frequently and later into the night, but neither of those give you a sense of how much more mobility the average citizen experiences. Given that Hamilton has a two-hour time-limited transfer, being able to show all the amenities one can access and still get back home on one fare is something that everyone can understand and appreciate.
Jane lets you do that.
Baseline Conditions. While there is some downtown redevelopment, most of Hamilton’s growth is on the fringes where travel time to the downtown core exceeds 60 minutes.
Future Conditions. More direct service and more frequent service means less waiting and easier connections. That helps decrease travel times for the places where Hamilton is growing fastest.
Using this feature, I was able to show in an easy-to-digest way that the average rider could get much further in 30 minutes riding my network than they could on the network of today just by boosting frequencies. I was able to show that some areas of the City, which were further than an hour away could be brought into the 45-minute zone just by offering more direct service. And, I was able to show that areas of the City’s fringe — areas that many might consider pointless to service — could be connected to many nearby amenities with some tweaks to the network. Everyone wants a quick trip downtown, but an easy trip to the shopping district a few blocks away is just as useful.
Literally speaking, Jane allow you take in a question like “What does this mean for me?” and reply “This!”
When I say that Jane stole the show, I’m not kidding. One of my classmates actually asked me if I could put Jane onto his neighbourhood to show what his transit experience could be under my changes.
Baseline Conditions. When a 60-minute transit trip from the suburbs doesn’t take you to either of the major barely takes you out of the car-dependent areas it should be no surprise that ridership is lower than it could be.
Future conditions. It’s difficult to convince citizens that change can be for the better, but before-and-after isochrones can offer tangible proof.
There’s one final anecdote I’d like to share, and it really underscores the reasons why Remix is superior to doing everything by spreadsheet. Hamilton’s LRT project has been part of the Regional Transit Plan for almost a decade, but the assumption had always been that the first phase would go to a major mall about 3 kilometres further east along the corridor. The funding announcement that traded that section for a connector line to the waterfront redevelopment area came two days before I was to make my final submission. In those two days, I redid my entire transit network vision to reflect the new reality and included that analysis as an appendix. My findings showed that the major mall terminus performed better than the funded terminus. I suspected that it would be better from a connectivity perspective, but being able to back that hunch up with actual cost estimates was golden.
Could I have done that analysis by hand in two days? No way. Given how useful it was to me in school, I can’t wait to use it in my career as a transit planner!
