Eric Jaffe
CityLab
It’s tough for mass transit to compete with the fast country roads and wide open spaces of America’s heartland. Take Omaha, Nebraska. Population and job densities are super low, the suburbs are super sprawled, parking is super cheap, and pedestrian infrastructure is anything but super. The city’s Metro bus system averages just 18 boardings per revenue-hour, and only two of its 34 lines run every 15 minutes—the minimum threshold for show-up-and-go service.
“There’s areas where we still don’t stand a chance against cars,” says Evan Schweitz, a planner with the city’s Metro transit agency.
But demand for better transit is ticking slowly upward in Omaha—especially downtown. Population in the core was up 5.5 percent in 2010 over 2000. Metro ridership has been on a steady rise and eclipsed 4.2 million trips in 2012. A microtransit start-up just launched a bar shuttle. Residential developments without on-site parking are no longer out of the question. “We’re seeing more people live downtown and prefer to not own a car,” says Schweitz.
A car-free lifestyle is about to get easier in Omaha. At the end of May, Metro will debut its FORWARD plan: a fully reconfigured bus network that emphasizes more frequency, better night and weekend service, direct lines through high-ridership corridors, and grid-style access to many parts of the city. The top five routes will now all get 15-minute peak service, and there’s a new max wait time of an hour across the system—down from 90-to-120 minutes.
All this for the cost of: on the house. Rather than lobby for more taxpayer funding or jack up fares, Metro looked for more efficient ways to use its existing resources. (Similar to what Houston recently did on a larger scale.) System coverage will suffer a bit, but the remaining service will be much stronger. “We haven’t made a change this big in 20 years,” says Schweitz. “The city’s changed a little bit since then, and our routes didn’t really reflect that.”
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