Market Analysis
Our market analysis is geared to answer some key questions:
Where do people live, who do we serve, and how has their travel changed?
How can we help make sure that transit works for how people's travel patterns have changed and are likely to change in the future?
We've tried to answer these questions below as best as we can. Here's what we're seeing:
Service Evaluation
While the market analysis aims to answer how peoples' needs have changed, the service evaluation focuses on some key questions about how people are using the transit network and how well we're doing at serving peoples' needs:
Where are people riding transit today? How have those patterns changed since before the pandemic?
When are people riding transit today? How have those patterns changed since before the pandemic? How do those patterns track with how people in our communities our want to travel?
We've tried to answer these questions below as best as we can. Here's what we're seeing:
Public Engagement
The market analysis and service evaluation focus heavily on numbers and data analysis, which tell part of our story, but we can't get a full picture of what's going on with transit without talking to people and asking them about their lived experiences and documenting the information we receive.
Boots-on-the-ground, active public engagement, and survey work provide a qualitative human perspective on what quantitative data might not tell us.
Below shows how tremendously the project team worked to get the word out about this project, ask people about their transit needs, and encourage them to fill out our community survey.
Our project team has also forged formal partnerships with many different community-based organizations (CBOs) listed below to help us get in touch with and hear from individuals in harder-to-reach populations and ensure they can make their voices heard in our public conversation. These CBO partners have already been instrumental in helping us reach people who don't typically participate in public processes and will continue to do so throughout our process.
Some key themes emerged when we talked to people about Realign:
- Better service reliability
- Increased frequency on high-ridership routes
- More weekend service
- More weekday early morning and late evening service
- Restoration of pre-pandemic service levels
Community Survey Results
We received over 15,000 responses across our service area, which wildly exceeded our expectations and our targets and shows there is a lot of interest in transit service throughout the East Bay.
Our community survey, which was available online and in paper form in English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese, asked questions to help us understand how peoples' travel patterns changed since the pandemic, including why they use AC Transit, how often they use AC Transit, and when during the week and during the day they'd want more service.
We also asked about peoples' preferences when it comes to important transit network design trade-offs.
Use Patterns and Time of Day/Week Preferences
Respondents who rode AC Transit before the pandemic and still do reported riding for about the same reasons that they did before, but they're riding less often now.
55% reported riding AC Transit for work 50% for social functions 40% for shopping and dining 26% for medical/dental appointments 21% for school Before the pandemic, 39% of our riders report riding 5-7 days a week, but only 28% do today, which tracks with ridership trends.
Respondents preferred more service during midday and late evenings over early morning or late night service.
53% ranked 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. as their top option 46% ranked 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. as their second option
Respondents preferred more service during the daytime over early morning or late night service.
71% ranked more daytime Saturday service as their top option 48% ranked more daytime Sunday service as their second option
Transit Trade-Off Questions
Respondents preferred keeping more service on main streets over deviating buses to destinations to shorten walk time.
Most respondents preferred more frequent, direct service over shorter walk times. Those with disabilities tended to prefer shorter walk times.
Respondents were split between a network that favors transfers with more frequent service versus a network that serves more destinations directly without a transfer.
Those with lower incomes and those who answered the paper survey instrument (distributed with an emphasis on harder-to-reach communities) preferred more frequent service with transfers more than other populations.
Respondents generally preferred service on routes where more people tend to ride as compared to wider geographic coverage.
Concentrating service where more people ride makes the network more useful for more people, but puts fewer people within range of the network. There was less variation in responses for this trade-off question.
