ThinkLink Survey Results
We finished our public surveys in June, and now have the results compiled and ready for you to see.
The amount of input we received during this process was very good, with almost 2,700 respondents to the online and the mail survey combined. Add to this the input we received in the 2016 survey and some other comments gathered during this process, and the total is almost 4,000.
What we heard from those who responded was that they want more transit service. More service during the week, and more service operating on weekends. They would like us to expand service to cover some more areas, and to provide more frequent service in some cases.
The full report on the 2017 surveys is available here.
Available Resources
Link has budgeted $700,000 for additional service in 2018. This is an amount that, under currently forecasted financial models, we can sustain for the long term. This amount will pay for about 11,666 hours of service, or about 45 hours more per day each weekday. This means that there could be 2 - 3 hours more of service on some routes, or more on some routes and less on others.
Next Steps
At our August Board meeting, staff were directed to begin developing service plans to to focus the majority of available resources on expanding service hours during the week. Over the next few weeks, we will be working on several different scenarios that address this. If you have specific requests or wishes for earlier or later service on a specific route, please let us know This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Our board feels that there is greater opportunity to get higher levels of ridership on service added during the weekdays than with service added on weekends. However, depending on the scope of weekday service expansion, there may be some limited opportunities to improve weekend service.
The timeline on this process is to finalize the service plan by late January/early February, and implement this additional service in July 2018.
Every day, more and more people are riding Link Transit to get where they need to go. This means that along all our urban area routes, every few blocks a bus may stop to pick up or drop off passengers, pulling out of traffic when there is room to do so. Sometimes this is not possible depending on the configuration of the roadway and the width of the parking lane.
