nMotion did not spend a lot of time on this topic but I believe it is important in order to gain broad acceptance of the final product. The nMotion document conveys a Goldilocks breadth of local service possibilities in the three scenarios. Presumably good, better or best service come with cheap, quality and premium price tags; nMotion has shied away from any discussion of costs thus far.
nMotion has not yet demonstrated that the three Scenarios are the output of a Transit Network Design Problem optimization. Instead, everything appears to have been “eyeballed”, whereas my eyeballs have traveled by car and bus over Nashville streets for thirty years and I feel like I’ve arrived at a different solution. And I am just a lay person.
Better Local Service needs to have a discussion of service level standards such as how to balance distance to stops, frequency, coverage, costs, fares. For instance, the State of the System appendix discusses many performance metrics of all of the MTA routes. Which are important? What are the levels of service differences in the three scenarios? What are the metrics that MTA/RTA going to discuss when they translate service quality into funding requests?
There should be some discussion of topology. Since Nashville is so peculiar I don’t think a grid (the transit consultant’s favorite) is the what our bus system will look like. I thought hub and spoke was to be discouraged in this study but that is what a lot of maps look like. That is not the system I devised when I thought about the problem and produced the suggestion of the three loops in the document linked to my name above.
We start with a hub and spoke system were all routes go downtown to the Music City Center. It is bad. nMotion added some crosstown routes including some I cannot imagine anyone would ever use. nMotion introduces connections and extra fares where none are necessary, in my opinion.
nMotion should use the NashvilleNext report to lay out where service should and should not be. NashvilleNext kept Goodlettsville but even $5.4 billion does not get even a RapidBus out this far. Bellevue seems to have gotten cut off. Folks in Goodlettsville either go downtown or to Rivergate; that should be a feature of the network. I presume similar can be said for Bellevue and southeast Davidson County. At least in Scenario 1 the folks in southeast Davidson County can make a few transfers to get someplace without going downtown. It must be easier than that; it is in my report.
More to do here: topology, metrics, parameters, optimization.
nMotion did not spend a lot of time on this topic but I believe it is important in order to gain broad acceptance of the final product. The nMotion document conveys a Goldilocks breadth of local service possibilities in the three scenarios. Presumably good, better or best service come with cheap, quality and premium price tags; nMotion has shied away from any discussion of costs thus far.
nMotion has not yet demonstrated that the three Scenarios are the output of a Transit Network Design Problem optimization. Instead, everything appears to have been “eyeballed”, whereas my eyeballs have traveled by car and bus over Nashville streets for thirty years and I feel like I’ve arrived at a different solution. And I am just a lay person.
Better Local Service needs to have a discussion of service level standards such as how to balance distance to stops, frequency, coverage, costs, fares. For instance, the State of the System appendix discusses many performance metrics of all of the MTA routes. Which are important? What are the levels of service differences in the three scenarios? What are the metrics that MTA/RTA going to discuss when they translate service quality into funding requests?
There should be some discussion of topology. Since Nashville is so peculiar I don’t think a grid (the transit consultant’s favorite) is the what our bus system will look like. I thought hub and spoke was to be discouraged in this study but that is what a lot of maps look like. That is not the system I devised when I thought about the problem and produced the suggestion of the three loops in the document linked to my name above.
We start with a hub and spoke system were all routes go downtown to the Music City Center. It is bad. nMotion added some crosstown routes including some I cannot imagine anyone would ever use. nMotion introduces connections and extra fares where none are necessary, in my opinion.
nMotion should use the NashvilleNext report to lay out where service should and should not be. NashvilleNext kept Goodlettsville but even $5.4 billion does not get even a RapidBus out this far. Bellevue seems to have gotten cut off. Folks in Goodlettsville either go downtown or to Rivergate; that should be a feature of the network. I presume similar can be said for Bellevue and southeast Davidson County. At least in Scenario 1 the folks in southeast Davidson County can make a few transfers to get someplace without going downtown. It must be easier than that; it is in my report.
More to do here: topology, metrics, parameters, optimization.
Roy Wellington