This week in transit: GRTC looking for Fulton feedback

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On February 20th from 7:00–8:00 PM, GRTC will host a public meeting at the Neighborhood Resource Center of Greater Fulton to “solicit feedback from Greater Fulton residents, businesses and riders about bus routes serving this area.” This meeting will take place about a month after the two 15-minute routes connecting folks living in Fulton to the Pulse had their frequencies halved. If those changes impacted your commute, this would be the time and place to share those concerns with GRTC. Also, if your favorite Fulton bus stop needs benches, lights, a trash can, or a concrete pad you can and should bring those issues up at this meeting as well.

Also! Don’t forget about Chesterfield’s Route 1 public transportation survey! If you live, work, play, worship, or learn on the corridor please fill out this survey—and send it to other folks who do as well. It’s far past time Route 1 had dedicated, fixed-route public transportation service provided by GRTC!

AROUND THE REGION

GRTC will celebrate Black History month by continuing its tradition of honoring local Black history-makers. You can check out this year’s honorees over on the GRTC website.

The Nation has a long piece about how bad bus service and extreme commutes impact people’s lives in the Washington D.C. region. You should read through this piece with an eye toward Richmond, because, at least on a smaller scale, you can find most of the concerns raised right here in town. For example, this sentence but sub in Chesterfield and Henrico: “A lot of these workers in low-wage jobs—they either have to [move] to Prince George’s County, Maryland, or Alexandria, Virginia, and the transportation network has not changed to meet the changing demand”

ELSEWHERE

The link between the increase in use of transportation network companies (TNC), like Uber and Lyft, and the decrease in ridership of public transportation is complex but probably not positive. That said, pilot partnerships between ridesharing companies and public transit agencies, like this one in Los Angeles, can be interesting. Key points from this particular pilot: Trips must begin or end at one of three rail stations, the TNC involved (Via) avoids trips with a single passenger, and riders that are registered with the existing low-income fare program can ride for free.

Atlanta just hosted the Super Bowl and, as a result, marked record highs in transit ridership before and after The Big Game. The flexibility with which MARTA responded to the changing transit needs—running 24-hour rail service and adding trains—is impressive.

Streetsblog looks into how Seattle is putting pedestrians first when designing safe street crossings—something you’d think would be the default but, unfortunately, is not.

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: Bring fixed-route bus service to Route 1 in Chesterfield County

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It sounds like Chesterfield County has mostly decided to provide some sort of public transportation on Route 1 from the City limits to John Tyler Community College. Whether that will be fixed-route bus service provided by GRTC (👍) or an on-demand service provided by a private company (👎) remains to be seen. To help inform their decision, the County has put together a survey for folks who live, work, play, learn, and worship along the corridor. If you spend any time at all along Route 1 please fill out this survey! If you know people who spend any time at all along Route 1 please send them this survey!

AROUND THE REGION

Mark your calendars for February 28th! RVA Rapid Transit, along with a handful of other organizations, will host Mayorathon: Policy Jam from 6:30 – 8:00 PM at the Institute for Contemporary Art. We’ll sit down with Mayor Stoney to discuss his first two years in office and then also recommend priorities for his next two years. The evening will feature an in-depth, entertaining, and informal discussion on policy issues, with special guest appearances. It’s gonna be fun, wonky, and a good way to spend your Thursday evening. You can and should RSVP here.

At some point recently, GRTC installed new snow-route badges on some of their bus stop signs (pictured above). These charming little snowflakes let you know if your bus still serves that particular stop when GRTC switches over to snow routes. It’s a little, infrequently-used thing, but sure makes a big difference for folks standing out in the cold and snow.

ELSEWHERE

This Women Changing Transit mentorship program run by TransitCenter sounds awesome: “This program aims to connect women transit professionals with women leaders in transit to serve as mentors to help guide, advise and grow in their careers. The year-long mentorship program is open to applicants who identify as women and who are in the first 10 years of their career, in any facet of the transportation field: planning, engineering, administration, operations, finance, and advocacy. The multidisciplinary nature of this mentorship is intended to support and enhance connections and relationships across public/private/non-profit lines.” If you’re even slightly interested in this, I really recommend that you apply. The TransitCenter folks are wonderful to work with!

Now that our Bus Rapid Transit line is up and running, it’s fun to follow other cities through their BRT planning processes. Both Birmingham and Charleston are working through the next steps of bringing rapid transit to their towns.

These subway station designs in Toronto are beautiful / interesting!

—Ross Catrow

Design your own bus stop shelter...

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GRTC has released a survey that you can fill out to help them decide what our new bus stop shelters should look like. First, it’s excellent that we’re getting new shelters—the existing ones are...suboptimal. Second, the background to this is that GRTC had designs for new shelters in front of the City’s Urban Design Committee late last year and someone (someone who may or may not write a weekly email about transportation-related topics) submitted a comment that the chosen design looked dated and didn’t feel like part of the same transportation system as our fancy new Pulse Stations. GRTC pulled the paper from UDC (😬), and now we have this very thorough survey about what folks might want out of a bus stop shelter. Unsolicited opinion, should you decide to fill out this survey: Choose something modern, mostly glass, and as far away from anything that looks like it belongs in Colonial Williamsburg. Almost ten years ago San Francisco redesigned their bus top shelters to something modern, useful, and even solar-powered—we can do it, too!

AROUND THE REGION

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a story about GRTC missing their revenue projection by $1 million. Note that’s a revenue projection and that GRTC’s budget is still balanced. Regardless of what this means for the transit company moving forward, riders should not shoulder the burden of revenue shortfall through service cuts—it’s something to keep an eye on.

ELSEWHERE

TransitCenter has a good article about the reasons to decriminalize fare evasion. Richmond’s fare enforcement officers are not police officers, and if you are caught evading fare on the Pulse it is a not a criminal offense. This is good policy and should remain GRTC’s policy moving forward. Many studies have shown “that fare enforcement disproportionately targets black and brown people, and that people of color face harsher penalties when they are stopped.”

Also from TransitCenter, check out this Open Transit Data Toolkit. Are you interested in wrangling the data GRTC makes available into useful tools for the rest of us? This is an excellent resource to get you started.

The CEO of MARTA (Atlanta’s transit company), says he wants the region to spend $100 billion dollars over 40 years on transportation projects. The last sentence of that editorial is a good one: “To maximize a prosperous future that seems in the cards for this metro, we must be willing to dream and build aggressively toward it, we believe.”

—Ross Catrow