2018 GDOT Annual Report

G R E E N S B O R O T R A N S I T A U T H O R I T Y

Planning for 2040: New Routes, More Frequent Service

By 2040, Greensboro expects to have more frequent bus recommended: service, cross-town connectors, and expanded weekend service – among other strategies the transit authority may implement to make the system more efcient and increase ridership.

• Increased services on the busiest routes. Currently, a bus comes to each stop as often as twice an hour in each direction. Mobility Greensboro 2040 recommends increasing frequency to every 15 minutes or better on the routes with the highest ridership: Routes 6, 10, and 11, Route 12, which will be revised to only cover the Elm-Eugene corridor and a new Route 18, which will cover the Randleman Road corridor.

The Greensboro Transit Authority (GTA) has spent more than a year designing a long-term plan called Mobility Greensboro 2040. The plan is an in-depth study of the existing transit needs and a vision for future growth and development. A draft plan was presented to the GTA Board in June 2018 and fnal adoption is expected later this year. GTA staf is already working on recommendations for implementing short-term changes that can be adopted within the system’s existing budget, although full implementation of the concepts will take decades. The plan considered industry best practices as well as local data and public input. The plan recommends improvements that minimize route deviations, provide two-way service for every route, and create a system where the service is the same every day of the week.

With those key principles in mind, the plan

• Creating designated transit corridors. This type of design would create special travel lanes for buses, and give public transit trafc signal priority. • Reducing route deviation. The current system has some routes that travel along diferent roads going inbound and outbound. It means that a rider may have easy access to a bus stop in one direction, but not on the return trip. Reducing deviation may encourage more riders to use the system, but it could also decrease the number of neighborhoods GTA buses directly reach. • Creating new cross-town connector routes. All of GTA’s buses are currently routed through the Depot downtown – which may not make for the quickest trip. TMD recommends creating new routes that

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