Revisiting the Past to Inspire Future Transit in Eugene, OR

Lane Transit District serves the areas surrounding Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, south of Portland and about 50 miles from the Oregon Coast. LTD currently functions as a hub-and-spoke system, though as the region grows, explains Tim Simon, a service planner, LTD’s configuration is slowly changing.

“Our downtown Eugene station is where most of our transfer activity occurs,” he says. “Transfers are essential, but we also are confined by the limited capacity of our station. As Eugene grows, so does the its need for improved transit — I kind of call Eugene a mid-major city that’s about to make the leap into a bigger city with more transit requirements. Station capacity is essential, so we’re really looking at making a jump from a hub-and-spoke to more of a hybrid.”

As LTD plans for more crosstown connections — both organically and through a long-range planning process called Moving Ahead that includes building out the successful EmX BRT — Tim has employed Remix.

Without Remix, a sketching session like that could have taken weeks.

“How Remix really saves me time is instead of drawing something on, you know, taking a screenshot of Google and doing a hand-drawn line image, or doing something like that and submitting it to our graphics team and waiting on them to make a map, then realizing there’s a mistake and sending it back, I can do all this now and come up with unlimited scenarios within an hour,” he says. Without Remix, a sketching session like that could have taken weeks. Tim has also reduced the amount of time spent in either LTD’s scheduling software, or physically driving, to estimate a route’s potential costs.

Plus, Tim has tackled a particularly confounding spot within LTD’s service area, a golf course among senior and low-income housing nicknamed the “donut hole.” Bounded by highways and a river, it lacks any effective through-routes, and over the past 30 years, LTD planners have struggled to connect it effectively to the rest of the system. Facing public pressure to route service through the donut hole once again, Tim used Remix to illustrate all seven lines that have served the area since 1985. He named each map the title of the historical route (see below) and the years it was active, and brought it to LTD’s board.

We need to do something that hasn’t been done before, which is establish the frequency and serve the area with a crosstown route.

“I put them all in there together so you can see how many iterations there are, just so [the board] understands that throwing out another one, a different configuration, that’s been done in the past and it’s not the way to go,” he says. “We need to do something that hasn’t been done before, which is establish the frequency and serve the area with a crosstown route. I think it’ll be a really interesting visual.”

Moving Ahead, on top of LTD’s desire to develop more crosstown connections, “is going to be a big change for our customers,” says Tim — and is likely to move LTD closer to effectively connecting the donut hole to the rest of the system. “We have to do it slowly and make sure they understand the benefits of it.” Remix has drastically reduced the time LTD’s planners are spending testing ideas for greater mobility: With Remix, Tim says, “there’s so many different ways you can do that.”