NFTA Erie County Service Restructuring & Fare Analysis « Buffalo Rising News

NFTA Erie County Service Restructuring & Fare Analysis on Saturday, February 20th, 2010

For those of you who take - or take an interest in - public transportation, know that on January 25th the NFTA was given their Draft Service Restructuring Plan by their consultants, TMD Inc. It presented some very positive potential changes coming to our transit system. This is not a master plan or a grand vision for the future of transit improvements like we might want to see, but it does present some pretty good and new ideas about how to use and simplify our system.

The plan has a slew of interesting and useful conclusions; it appears more honest in many respects than some of the previous plans created by the NFTA that praised the current system too much. This does have some of that same rhetoric, but instead of using it to stay the course, it becomes a platform for reform and to be built upon (which is what any good plan should do). Below are a couple of the points from the presentation worth mentioning:

• Significant complexity results from the maintenance of historic service patterns and attempting to serve too many origins and destinations in suburban and rural areas.

• Existing service frequencies are universally uneven, primarily for efficiency and operational reasons making system very unpredictable

• Even many of the strongest Metro routes reach 15‐minute headways only in peak periods, but they can also support 15 minute off‐peak frequencies

• Existing frequencies limit customer ability to use system as a network

The plan's big goal is to create a seamless system and that will create a 10-minute core area of service along select routes. Since 80 pecent of the boardings for the current system occur within the city, this primarily affects the urban routes, but it does extend out along important corridors to the Galleria/Niagara Falls Boulevard. This basically means that on any of these routes you will wait 10-15 minutes between buses for the whole day. In the evenings, this would change to 30 minutes and then late at night, 1 hour. This would add the benefits of predictability to the system - one of the big hold backs right now. How great would it be to walk to Elmwood, Grant, Hertel, Fillmore, Niagara, Genesee and KNOW that in 15 minutes there will be a bus or that every hour at night there is a bus? Transit systems don't need to run often all the time, but they do need to be predictable all the time.

The plan impacts the fare structure as well (top image), and proposes the elimination of both transfer and zone charges. Trying to figure out when to pay what and where is often where my friends' eyes glaze over just before they give up. The nickel and dime approach to paying your way is a valid idea, but adds way too much confusion. This alone would be a huge improvement to making the whole system much easier. The plan also proposes the elimination of many express routes in favor or more direct and expressway oriented routes, in order to create express routes that actually can be considered express. Many of the current express routes are hard-pressed to be named such.

This is not to say there are not a couple places that seem overlooked in the current proposal. I would think that the airport is a blatant miss in the current proposal, since it is not a part of the enhanced system. Also, why should Sycamore be the route to get to the Galleria, when the Genesee route could serve both the mall and the airport and the Sycamore route could be eliminated altogether. I say eliminate it because for the majority of the area served by Sycamore could easily be served by either Genesee or Broadway, both major streets with some remnants of retail and commercial activity, while Sycamore is basically residential until it reaches Walden.

Look how close the three routes are (link to map above) until after Fillmore Ave, and even beyond at their widest point around Bailey is only ½ mile between Sycamore to Genesee or Sycamore to Broadway. Making Genesee the main route to both the Galleria and the Airport to Downtown in an efficient and understandable way would be beneficial for everyone. I also question the reason to stop the enhanced Amherst street route at Elmwood when Wegmans and the rising downtown Black Rock are just around the bend and connecting to the enhanced Grant Street and Niagara Street routes would allow for a better systemic connections overall.

What do you think? Are these changes enough to make you think about taking transit more often or for the first time? Is it enough to help people drop the car, reduce its use, or drive even more?

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