Scenario Planning and Service Tweaks in Pierce County, WA
“We started using Remix when we were developing one of our growth scenarios for our long-range plan,” says Max Henkle, a senior planner at Pierce Transit in Washington state. Pierce Transit serves the southern Puget Sound region and, while its Destination 2040 plan wasn’t designed completely in Remix, Max used our platform to illustrate an included aspirational scenario — a total reinvention of the network. Rather than redrawing the Pierce Transit’s entire network in GIS, Max drew it in Remix, along with a.m. peak frequencies, and exported it as a shapefile.
But long-range plans don’t happen every day. Pierce’s planners are constantly evaluating routes on a short- and medium-range basis, and in doing so, typically draw out every iteration of a change that they can imagine. Exploring so many different options allows Max and his team to come up with compromises that “make the most number of riders happy, or perform the best,” he says. “With Remix, it makes it easier to explore that intellectually, rather than taking those ideas and manually digitizing everything, then calculating the service requirements.” Regionally, service changes now take place in March and September, so tweaks that Max is considering could take place then.
Pierce Transit is also using Remix to consider different scenarios for a proposed BRT line over its most productive route, which could be anywhere from seven to 20 miles. “There are a lot of ways to skin a cat,” Max says, and he’s used Remix throughout the development of three main scenarios: “We would draw it out, where we thought the proposed termini were, along with the proposed route, and that quickly gives us an estimate of not only the service hours and miles for each of those scenarios, roughly how many people and jobs and other demographic factors are nearby.”
As those scenarios are further developed, they’ll be taken to Pierce Transit’s board, to focus groups, and, eventually, to the public — all of which will come with input and negotiations. “When you’re trying to sell something to someone in a meeting, when you’re trying to get your executives engaged and there are these heated discussions about “Why don’t we just turn around at this transit center? Why do we have to go all the way to downtown Tacoma?” and it’s handy to be able to say, “Well, when we draw this line over here, Remix tells us that we can serve an additional 14,000 jobs within a quarter-mile of those downtown stops” he says. “So it makes it a more compelling argument for why you’re doing things a certain way when you can quickly see what the efficacy of where you’re placing the stops and how you’re structuring the route.”
Customer comments aren’t beholden to the occasions of particular planning initiatives, and Max has also used Remix to answer inquiries about general service patterns. When a customer submitted a comment, he sketched out the hypothetical out in Remix, “just to see what it looked like and to see if it made sense,” he says. “For those quick little investigations — reality-checking something — it’s kind of handy.”
For more about Pierce Transit, read our interview with Max Henkle.
Photo via Flickr
