REIMAGINE REGINA TRANSIT: REVITALIZATION THROUGH REDESIGN
Transit Network Design Principles A transit network can be designed in a variety of ways, depending on its key goals. For the City of Regina, the stated goal is to have 90 percent of residents within a five-minute walking distance (400m) of a bus stop. In this regard, Regina strives for service coverage and not necessarily other goals, such as frequency of service, reliability, or route connectivity. In a system with limited resources, making choices about the primary goals of the network’s design can greatly impact the total number of people who can utilize the transit service, as well as the service quality. Leading practice in transit network design is shifting away from the primary goal of coverage towards maximizing ridership. This network design philosophy emphasizes several key components that are associated with increased ridership: direct routes, frequent service, and easy connections and transfers. By simplifying the network’s legibility along a basic grid and redeploying service to secure frequencies of 15 minutes or lower through the day, ridership increases, as do fare revenues. This creates a virtuous cycle which enable the transit provider to ultimately help the greatest number of people get to where they need to go. One champion of this philosophy, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner from Portland, Oregon, has led network redesigns in cities as diverse as Houston, Texas and Auckland, New Zealand; these redesigns are presented as case studies below.
Houston,Texas Houston, Texas undertook a network redesign in order to address integration with new light rail lines and adapt to shifting customer demands. Since 2001, bus ridership had dropped by 20 percent (Stephens, 2015). Due to economic restructuring, the downtown was no longer the primary centre of employment but was still the hub of the transit network. With the rise of work in non-traditional hours, customers were seeking improved service at night and on weekends—an issue that was also raised in the Regina Transit Survey. In addition, many buses faced regular delays due to road crossings with railways. To respond to all these pressures, Metro Transit (2015) undertook a comprehensive analysis of the bus network to redeploy services in a more cost-effective and efficient method. After extensive public consultation about the network’s primary goal of ridership or coverage, Metro Transit ultimately decided to dedicate 80 percent of resources to achieve maximum ridership, with the remaining 20 percent allocated to service coverage. Prior to the network redesign, resources were distributed 50-50. With the changes, 94 percent of riders maintained service at existing stops. Access to frequent service, defined as every fifteen minutes, seven days a week, increased from 25 percent of riders to 72 percent of riders (Preciado, 18
Regina should be an easy city to cover with a fast, cheap transit system. The terrain is flat, streets are a simple grid, and the weather, though very cold in winter, is usually light on precipitation so traffic flows are uninterrupted. But the current system, though not terrible, is mediocre and, because expensive and slow, is ridiculously underused. The current thinking seems to be to try to get an infrequent bus past everyone’s door instead of having regular, fast, cheap, integrated service down major arteries. At weekends and holidays the service is rudimentary. Incredibly, there is no public transit to the airport! — Survey response from Regina resident 2016). The revised network anticipates a reduction in delays due to rail crossings by almost 30 percent. The network was based on a non-growth revenue principle, meaning the proposal would not cost any additional dollars to implement. Since its implementation in summer 2015, the new network has seen ridership increase 4 percent (Schmitt, 2016).
Auckland, New Zealand With new rail lines opening, Auckland, New Zealand undertook an analysis of their bus system to reorient service and reduce duplication. With a new priority focus on frequent service, the network was redesigned from a direct service model—which features many overlapping and infrequent routes-- to a connective network model that features fewer routes but higher frequencies. As a result, the new network features more frequent service, from 7am to 7pm everyday, with simpler routing. In South Auckland, the new network increased the number of residents within walking distance of frequent service from 12 percent to 30 percent. To accommodate the new network,AucklandTransport (2016) has invested in new exchanges to ease transfers, introduced integrated ticketing across all modes, and improved real time information at key stops and stations. The network changes have been rolling out, regionally, since 2015, with anticipated completion by 2017.
Current Network Analysis Regina’s network is a perfect candidate to undergo a similar network redesign. The 2015 Regina Transit Network consisted of twenty bus routes, with service to virtually all neighbourhoods in the city as well as most “key destinations,” which will be further explained later in this section (see Figure 11). Although the city has already implemented several changes to increase ridership, such as the express routes, the network is still primarily based on an inefficient hub and spoke system