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40 CHAPTER 3: INTERPRETATION, APPRAISAL AND APPLICATIONS The general goals of this research were to build on prior work that had been done in this area; to add in a more specific nexus between suburban land use and suburban transit; and to produce guidelines for evaluating, selecting and implementing suburban transit services. The research has included a thorough analysis of the state of suburban transit including: ⢠A detailed literature search of both land-use and transit documents and practices. ⢠The selection of almost thirty preliminary case studies and the compilation of data from all those systems. ⢠An extensive analysis of services and environments in eight detailed case studies located in across the country providing a variety of services. ⢠The cross sectional review of the results of those case studies using land use and performance measurement techniques. The research team, which included a variety of skills and expertise in land-use planning, academic research, transit capacity and quality of service analysis, understanding of suburban settings and characteristics as well as extensive operational experience from both the public sector and private sector consulting perspectives, collaborated on a work program to stretch the paradigm, especially in the areas of land use and transit linkage to provide meaningful information to the transit industry. In retrospect the land-use linkage goals proved to be too ambitious, with more time and energy expended in the pursuit of data collection and then the processing of these data into consistent and comparable formats. As a result, the extensive data expressed in the Detroit, Minneapolis, Albany and Portland case studies were not collected and processed for the other locations. However, it should be noted that when the services for the areas with detailed land-use data were analyzed, there were limited findings regarding consistent results. Similarly a more traditional review of typical transit performance measurement factors did not produce any consistent findings that would suggest generalizations that could be applied to these services that were operating in various areas around the country. Interestingly, the most specific set of conclusions resulted from a Pearson correlation analysis of the local circulators in Broward County. In this analysis, the comparison of locales with similar characteristics appeared to be more valuable from the standpoint of reinforcing some typical transit norms, such as more transit use in higher density, lower income areas. Thus, just as other data collected at the national level are sometimes criticized as comparing apples and oranges depending on the consistency and accuracy of reporting (for example, National Transit Data for paratransit), the suburban transit data regarding the services implemented and the comparative successes are influenced greatly by local factors. With regard to the services themselves, they are very similar to the types of services that were previously evaluated, grouped into the following categories: ⢠Commuter ⢠Route deviation ⢠Demand response ⢠Circulators ⢠Shuttles
41 ⢠Vanpools The typical trip purposes that are served included longer distance commute, connections to the regional transit network and intra-community connections. As part of the data collection and analysis performed, there appear to be several factors that significantly influence the operation and availability of suburban transit services, including: ⢠Local policy and planning decisions regarding standards and performance measurement have the greatest impact on whether services are sustained. ⢠In many instances these decisions are influenced by the availability of local funding or the ability to obtain local funding through the provision of these services. ⢠A large percentage of the suburban services provided in the preliminary and detailed case study sites were developed to offer service connections in areas with relatively lower demand for transit and included solutions ranging from fixed-route to demand-responsive services. ⢠Many of these services, especially route deviation and demand-responsive, are focused on providing area coverage, but often provide connection to the regional bus system. ⢠The increase in population and development in new or growing suburban areas has also resulted in an increase in commuter services in corridors that access those suburban areas, especially commuter bus services. As a result, the typical suburban system today includes local, regional and commuter services. With regard to the potential for future research, it would appear that one of the difficulties associated with this research project ahs been developing a sufficient amount of data on service types and communities to expand that data to be of value to other communities. In essence, by attempting to include a greater variety of services the comparisons between services and communities was negatively affected, thus the lack of consistent findings for the aggregated data. Since it appears that the most common suburban transit issue is serving areas with lower demand, there may be value to isolating research regarding these types of services. This research could also include service solutions for people with disabilities, including ADA complementary paratransit alternatives, as well as the growing area of human service transportation coordination that has resulted from the Federal United We Ride program.
