The Rapid Mobility For All Preliminary Service Options

Introduction

Mobility For All is a planning process exploring practical ways to improve our transit system. We are developing a plan to use our available resources to better match where we go with where there is current and future demand for service.

Mobility For All is:

Evaluating existing transit services and how effectively they are serving the travel needs of the region
Positioning The Rapid to increase ridership by understanding what the current system is capable of and what can be achieved
Providing a roadmap with realistic, collaborative and implementable action steps to be taken over the next several years

Community Priorities

Multiple different priorities helped guide potential options for improving transit service, including:

Stakeholder and Board Engagement
Design Your Transit System survey
Operator Participation
Built on 2018 Align Study outreach

Community priorities for riders and non-riders included improving weekend service, addressing on-time performance issues, and improving all-day service frequency.

State of The Rapid

Prior to developing any recommendations existing operations and the market for transit were considered. Ridership was analyzed for every route at every stop, for each trip, as was on-time performance. Existing travel patterns, population and employment numbers, and demographic data were all assessed to understand the underlying market for transit.

Three different priorities were developed that reflect the public’s desires for service enhancements. These initial recommendations are intended to offer options for improving service within the existing budget. The three scenarios are as follows:

Frequency Scenario – This scenario seeks to improve the quality of service throughout the system by improving the all-day service frequency of key routes, and retain downtown Grand Rapids access.
Coverage Scenario – This scenario creates new east-west crosstown routes, improves the all-day frequency of key routes, and maintains shorter walks to transit service.
Weekend Service Scenario – This scenario presents limited frequency improvements on select corridors and includes a longer span of service and improved service frequency on Saturdays and Sundays.

Our goal is to collect feedback about the preliminary scenarios. All scenarios are concepts at this time. The preferred option will likely contain a combination of recommendations from each of the three scenarios, rather than a single scenario in its entirety. Therefore, as you make comments, please be specific about what you like or do not like about a scenario. The final recommendations will be based on feedback received from the public.

Thank you for participating!