In my previous job at the Utah Transit Authority, I was asked to look at travel times on transit compared with travel times by car under different service scenarios. The idea was, "Will changing the bus network substantially change the travel time by transit, and make transit more or less appealing?"
The images show competitive transit trip origins in Provo (most are headed to Brigham Young University). A trip is "competitive" if the total door-to-door trip time is less than 150% of the automobile time. That is, a transit time of 45 minutes would take 30 minutes or more in a car to be considered competitive.
The blue lines are under the existing UTA bus network, and the red lines are a proposed service network change, with essentially no increase in revenue miles. We found we could increase the competitive trips by about 15% with no substantial cost outlay. While this didn't always transfer directly into more transit riders in the model, there is clearly a potential to do this. (Mode choice models incorporate much more than travel time into the decision parameters, but perhaps a better service could begin to change behavior.)
This post is in partial response to the DC Metro's travel speed map on Streetsblog yesterday morning.
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