Charlie Huemmler, Yingxue Ou, Jack Rummler
MUSA 8010: MUSA/Smart Cities Practicum
The City of El Paso's Capital Improvements Department is seeking to understand how alterations to bus transit routes prioritize ridership, access, and equity. Our goal is to create a model that forecasts how proposed bus transit route designs achieve these criteria. Our model will be visualized in a web developed application that planners for the city of El Paso can use to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate alternative bus transit scenarios.
A business as usual approach toward bus transit planning in El Paso follows trends seen throughout the U.S. in transit planning; maximizing return on investment often drives inequitable ridership trends. El Paso's current complexities with bus transit planning are current route planning is based on total ridership, with a lack of metrics to aim for; and finding ways to plan efficient transit given land use patterns of the city (city limits take up a large land area with low density found throughout the city).
The use case for our app and forecast is for SunMetro planners. We imagine that planners will be able to select one of the proposed bus routes in our app, and evaluate each individual metric to see how well the route performs. These metrics will be derived from data given on ridership from the agency alongide socioeconomic indicators from the American Community Survey. Ultimately, planners can assess whether the route is efficient under the indicators and are able to decide if the new route should be implemented.
Charlie: Replica data, hexgrid
Jack: Open Street Map, presentation
Yingxue: Replica data