Short-range transit plan
The Porterville City Council agreed to have IBI Group, the company chosen to provide a plan to restructure Porterville Transit, meet with the public once again to gather additional information to develop a final draft of a short-range transit plan.
“We certainly heard from the public through the survey research and we now want to take them back to the public saying ‘this is what we think we heard, are we getting it right,” said Steve Wilks, an associate at IBI Group.
From what he’s seen so far in terms of the draft shortrange transit plan, Richard Tree, manager of the city’s transit center, said Wilks and the IBI Group are on a good track.
“The draft service plan potentially could take us into providing a level of service that is not seen in Tulare County,” Tree said. “This is really exciting.”
Tree said every five years transit agencies are required to provide a planning document that lays forth the direction of the transit agency for the next five years.
“This is particularly important to us as it gives us direction with federal funding and it really gives an indepth look at the operation, analyzes it, and then gives us recommendations to improve it,” Tree said.
What’s more is that consultants from the globally-integrated architecture, planning, engineering and technology firm said the city’s existing route network was designed over 20 years ago for a smaller, more compact Porterville in which most local trips either began or ended in the downtown area, said Mike Reed, the city’s public works director.
Today’s Porterville, Reed said, is geographically more spread out with many more destinations dispersed throughout the service area. Reed said that is another reason why key members of Porterville Transit enlisted the help from IBI Group to develop a five-year service plan that proposes significant network restructuring intended to make the city’s transit simpler to understand and easier to use, with fewer routes covering generally longer alignments that offer more one-seat ride opportunities between origins and destinations across the service area.
After conducting surveys and holding a number of public and one-on-one meetings, Wilks said he has a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not in terms of the city’s transit system.
One thing Wilks said is not working is the current requirement for virtually all trips to go to the transit center.
“It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes people want to go from point a to point b without a stop, or without the need for a transfer at the transit center,” Wilks said.
He said another aspect of the current system that the public wants changed revolves around the loops and some of the redundancies “where people are going in the wrong direction to get to their ultimate destination,” Wilks said.
To fix the issue, as well as others such as overly long transit travel times and customer wait times, Wilks proposed two options.
One is called the budget-neutral option, which Wilks said looks at restructuring the transit service system by making the routes more linear and with flex routes.
Replacing some of the transit’s marginal fixed routes with a flex route or demand-response type service, Wilks said, is a much more cost-effective way of providing transit service.
“When we look at the performance on a routeby-route basis, some are
doing really well and some are falling significantly below average,” Wilks said, adding that the routes with the least amount of people are in the southeast and northeast quadrants of the city.
Teague Kirkpatrick, of Routematch, a software company based in Atlanta that provides transit technologies to over 600 transit providers across the U.S., Canada and Australia, agreed.
Kirkpatrick said the main idea of the budget neutral option is to eliminate the low-density routes. Doing so, Kirkpatrick said, will not only save money, but also allow the city’s transit system to increase its high-density routes.
“You are actually saving money and providing better, higher quality service,” Kirkpatrick said. Wilks said the budgetneutral option will also upgrade all routes to a 40-minute frequency, and noted that it could be implemented “as soon as possible.”
“We think there’s significant benefit for the community and it [budget neutral option] could be done in a fiscallyresponsible way,” Wilks said.
However, because Wilks’ budget-neutral option eliminates certain routes, Vice Mayor Brian Ward questioned how the plan would work if there was a sudden spike in gas prices and more residents started to take the bus.
“Obviously you can’t forecast fuel cost spikes, and I know things are really low right now, but is there any contingency plans if there were [fuel cost spikes],” Ward said. “How do you track the demand that might come from other areas that are no longer served, how do you accommodate those.”
To accommodate those people, Wilks said there would be a demand-response service for them.
“Rather than run the fixed route, fixed schedule through a community where ridership is very, very low, particularly for certain times of day, just take the bus into the community when somebody actually wants it and that would require them making a phone call or requesting on their smartphone,” Wilks said, adding, “You are going to do those individual trips on an as-needed basis.”
Councilmember Cameron Hamilton liked the idea, but thought using a smaller bus would save more money.
However, Wilks said there is not a significant cost savings by going with a smaller capacity vehicle.
Wilks noted that he is thinking of using the same delivery framework for evening service. He added that he also plans on expanding the hours by half an hour in terms of buses running later in the evening, “but doing that through a flex route or demand-response type mode of delivery,” he said.
The second option Wilks proposed is what he calls the planning horizon option.
Although this option couldn’t be implemented immediately and is much more expensive than the first option, Wilks said it would reduce the frequency of service down to 30 minutes.
Wilks said the best feature of the planning horizon option is that it is scalable, meaning that it doesn’t have to be implemented in its entirety.
“You can implement increased service frequency, for example, on an incremental basis on select routes,” Wilks said. “On select routes, you could evolve from 40 minutes down to a 30-minute frequency and do that over time and again, and that is certainly what we want to explore.”
Wilks noted that he will have dollar figures attached to each option in the final draft of the short-range transit plan.