Hurrah, the open house boards were posted today! You can access the PDF here and dive into the data goodness.
The second page has stats from the survey conducted earlier this summer. I still can’t believe there were close to 800 respondents!
Page 3 has information about current CR Transit riders and the current fleet. You’ve probably heard that Cedar Rapids has one of the oldest fleets in the country, and now you have the proof. Standard bus life is 12 years or 500,000 miles. Even with the 4 brand new buses CR Transit received this year, most of the fleet should be considered beyond dead.
The rest of the file is maps, and I’m most interested in the “Productivity” and “Performance” maps on pages 7 and 8. These show which locations are used most heavily and where some rework can be done. Something important to note while looking at page 7 in particular, is that there was this big flood in 2008, so the large red and orange areas right next to the river won’t just be stripped out. More thought will need to go into how to handle access to the flood affected areas to balance current use, while (potentially) providing easy service increases as the areas recover.
Those are my thoughts, now share what you see in the data.
[PDF provided by the Corridor MPO]
Tags: cedar rapids, Corridor MPO, Hiawatha, Marion, open house
2009-09-28 at 7:38 pm |
Thanks for announcing these were up. Quite interesting info, particularly the route productivity and system performance maps. I’m curious about how they are looking at the route 5’s as a single route, since likely much of that high ridership is generated between downtown and Lindale, with less coming from Marion and Hiawatha. Then again, judging by the route productivity map, perhaps Lindale is the real key factor for the high ridership on the 5’s.
2009-09-28 at 8:43 pm |
The route 5’s are very interesting, and you reminded me of another 5’s insight that the consultants shared during their presentation. They found that there were significantly more transfers from the 5 routes to other routes in the morning than there were to the 5 routes in the evening. They think this means that the bus service isn’t running late enough for people that transferred in the morning to take the buses home after work, and are finding alternatives like cabs or maybe rides from friends. We could have told them the same thing, but the data is much more convincing :).
2009-10-21 at 10:55 am |
[...] but instead, logical recommendations based on the ridership statistics presented at the first open house. Routes like 4 and 10 barely had any changes, and I tended to agree with that. We noted some of [...]