capitolympia
Covering Planning and Community in Washington's Capital
Intercity Transit is in the middle of a rather large public outreach campaign. They have released a mock participatory budgeting survey. Different ideas for improving transit service in Thurston County are given a monetary quantity ranging from $10 to $50 and you are given $150 to "spend." This section below from the survey describes it pretty nicely. While working through the budget exercise, imagine you are a member of the Intercity Transit Authority. Knowing that it would take $430 to support all the services the community wants, your job is to decide how to spend a limited budget of $150 on transit services and customer amenities. This is then followed by a short section asking for your big ideas for improving transit in the county. I highly recommend taking the survey. It also enters you in to win a $250 visa gift card. I'm not going to tell you specifically which ones to vote for. There are well over $150 of valuable options on the list. However, I will say that what makes good transit service is having a lot of transit service. In particular I'm talking about frequency and the time span of service. That may sound obvious, but sometimes people get caught up on what's flashy and will forget that improving a route so a bus comes every 15 mins rather than 30 mins is much more useful than an electronic sign that tells you that the next bus will come in exactly 27 mins. Additionally the option of "improve speed and reliability" sounds promising, and several projects in the Pacific Northwest have already shown that capital improvements are an effective way of growing bus ridership. While most routes in Olympia simply need more service, there are some corridors that could benefit from infrastructure improvements. You have until September 15th to complete the survey.
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