So far, just about everyone who’s tried the MetroRail Red Line has really liked it. The ride is comfortable, reliable, and congestion-free. There’s interesting scenery and free wi-fi too.  As of last week, we’ve begun running midday service  and to a degree expanded the “market” we serve  beyond those  peak period commuters.  But we want to do more.

And we will. While funding limitations constrained the FY ’11 budget, our board of directors did have the foresight to include some trial service, namely four Fridays of extended evening service and three “special event” weekend service days. We’ve been evaluating how and when to best deliver this service, factoring in things like coordination with our freight rail operations, ensuring compliance with Federal Rail Administration requirements, ridership potential, and timing (we want to be able to evaluate the results and factor them into our FY 2012 budget development process which begins late Spring). And very importantly we wanted to give the community a chance to provide input, which we did over a few weeks via an online poll. As with other service adjustments, staff takes all the various factors into account and then makes a recommendation to the board.

We’re excited to announce our recommendation here at Capital Metroblog, and it’s as follows:

Friday Evening Extended Hours- every Friday in March (March 4, 11, 18 and 25) we’ll extend MetroRail service into the evening hours, with service running every 70 minutes from the Leander Station to the Downtown Station, and the last trip scheduled to depart the Downtown Station at 11:30 p.m. While we know that this is not as late as some might like, it will offer a broad range of the community the opportunity to try MetroRail to visit downtown or one of the other station areas outside of the typical commute period.

Special Event Service- All day service is slated to operate on the following days: March 12 and March 19 (take the train to SXSW!); and May 7 (take the train to the Pecan Street Festival!). March 19 and May 7 were both popular choices in the poll; March 12 was added to the planning discussion after the poll ended so that we could offer Friday evening and all day Saturday service for both weekends of SXSW. To provide more frequent service  and more people-carrying capacity on what we hope will be very busy weekends, we’re proposing to operate between Lakeline Station and the Downtown Station only. The reason for this approach is that it allows us to provide a train every 35 minutes for most of the day. If we were to operate all the way to Leander, due to track and train constraints, service levels could not run as often and capacity would be reduced.

For those of you wondering about some of the other dates we put out for consideration, we did get strong interest in operating during the ACL Festival and also on New Year’s Eve. Others have expressed interest in seeing the train run for UT football games. While we’ll keep these in mind for the future, we did not recommend them for these demonstration days in 2011 because we were concerned about the nature of the events (with very large “surges” in ridership demand resulting from the precise end times- for example, when the UT game is over, everyone wants to leave at once, potentially resulting in more riders than we can reasonably accomodate). As we saw in our early weekend service demonstration, and other rail systems (DART at the Cotton Bowl) have seen, it can be extremely difficult if not impossible to provide quality service under such conditions. So we elected to go with days when we expect to be able to deliver a better customer experience and still get a good sense of community interest in rail during the evening and weekend periods.

In closing, we hope you’ll come on out and give MetroRail a try, and that your friends and neighbors will too. Better yet, if we see that the demand exists, and our budget can afford it, we’ll use these demonstration days to make a recommendation for additional MetroRail service in 2012. Let us know what you think.

ServicePlan2020 attempts to strike a balance between a lot of key factors. At Capital Metro, we believe (and ServicePlan2020 supports the idea) that this community would benefit from an enhanced public transportation system with more coverage, frequency, route directness and hours of service. Yet we don’t have the means to deliver all of that within the available budget.

For example, the Bus Rider’s Union provided some very thoughtful input into the process early on, proposing a grid-like system of routes blanketing Central Austin with 24-hour service, and better yet with all routes operating once every 15 minutes! Cool idea that makes a lot of sense. However, when we ran the network through a preliminary cost analysis, we found that it would cost about 2.5 times more to operate than our current system. Capital Metro simply could not run such a system under our current funding structure.

The reality, then, is that some fundamental tradeoffs have to occur to balance things out, just as is the case at transit agencies across the country. Consider the following perspective, which is elaborated much more fully by transit planner Jarrett Walker on the Human Transit Blog:  transit is expected to fulfill not one, but two primary objectives.

First, transit is expected to provide mobility for people that do not have access to a car and to provide access to and from as many locations as possible. To accomplish this objective, service should be spread out like peanut butter on a piece of bread, trying to ensure maximum coverage. This has several implications: service will probably not be very direct as it will tend to wind into and out of neighborhoods; it will not run very often, since it will have to cover such a large area; the passenger amenities will be sparse, because there will be so many stops yet very few with substantial numbers of riders; and it likely will not attract significant new ridership because the service lacks convenience. However, such service will offer basic mobility to the greatest number of people.

Second, transit is expected to benefit society by helping fight traffic congestion on busy corridors, improve air quality by converting single-occupant vehicle trips to more environmentally-friendly shared trips, and to operate as cost-effectively as possible. To accomplish this objective, service should be concentrated, with service focused on major corridors in higher density areas, and it should operate at a high level so that it attracts riders away from the automobile.

The ServicePlan2020 team kept these two sometimes competing interests in mind when they developed recommendations for Capital Metro’s system. Take a look at the resulting plan on our Web site.

Big deal, you might say, Capital Metro changes its bus routes a few times a year, so how is this any different? The difference is in the scope. Whereas our three-times per year service adjustments are typically focused on individual routes, sections of routes, or areas of the city, Service Plan 2020 goes well beyond that. It looks at the existing network of routes and beyond while recognizing that indeed it is a system, one in which all of the parts should work well together.

Equally important, the effort attempts to approach this assessment from a customer perspective. It is informed by direct customer input through dozens of meetings and hundreds of surveys. It also takes into account the ‘markets’ that exist in the Austin area, using an approach called market segmentation. So just as beverage makers have long recognized that some folks like Coke and its many flavors while others prefer Pepsi (and its many flavors), market segmentation was used here, via phone surveys, to assess what types of transit people in Austin like. A range of market segments were identified, each with a unique set of preferences. For example, one market segment may value a sense of security at the bus stop very highly, while another may put a higher priority on the travel time on the bus. The team working on the project used these inputs to help shape the service recommendations.

Sounds great, right? Capital Metro should be able to design services that meet the needs of a broad range of the community, attract more riders and align the routes so they serve all areas of the city. If there were enough resources, then sure, that’s exactly what we’d do. As has been made all too clear of late, however, that is regrettably not the case. Capital Metro’s sales tax revenues (which constitute more than 70% of our annual budget) have declined by more than $50M since the economy went into a tailspin. Therein lies the rub.

So, there’s a plan but no money to implement it? Not exactly. The plan has been broken up into two main pieces: first are a set of near-term route changes that can be accomplished without additional revenue, and second are a group of longer-term improvements and additions that do require more funding to make happen.

The final report and recommendations of ServicePlan2020 are available online.  Chapter 5 details the individual route changes that have been recommended, and Chapter 7 is the tentative timeline for implementation. The board will consider adoption of the plan Feb. 22.

I’ll post more information about the various components of ServicePlan2020 on the blog between now and then.