A screenshot of Google Transit showing a transit trip traveling across Humboldt's three major transit services.

Why we need a more system-based approach for transit planning and customer information in Humboldt County...

"Why does HTA not sevice Blue Lake?" is a question someone asked on the Green Wheels core list, the email list that some Green Wheels advocates use to communicate among each other, last week.

The short answer is that Humboldt Transit Authority (HTA) does not serve Blue Lake because transit service between Arcata and Blue Lake is already offered five days a week by Blue Lake Rancheria Transit System. (It seems to me this "System" would appropriately called a "Service" since it's a single route… which relates to the topic of this post.)

The confusion over where transit is available, who is responsible for it, how to use it, and how to transfer between services is widespread (observe: even journalists refer to Humboldt Transit when they mean Redwood Transit System). This is because customer information and planning functions for transit are spread out across many separate organizations that produce their own websites, printed schedules, and etc.  The fact that someone on the core list wasn't aware of transit service to Blue Lake is a symptom of the difficulty of becoming aware of transit service and getting schedule information when no single source exists for this information.

Figuring out transfers between services has become easier since Google Transit for Humboldt County. But that won't help with Blue Lake Rancheria Transit, because they are not included in Google Transit. Actually, the only schedule you will find for Blue Lake Rancheria Transit "System" is still the one that's hosted on the Green Wheels website, and which I volunteered to put up for them a few years ago. You won't even find information about service holidays for the service anywhere online. I've offered to publish Blue Lake Rancheria Transit schedule information to Google Transit at essentially cost (no margin for equipment investment, marketing and the software development time that allows me to publish data to Google), but they do not seem to be interested in making it easier for passengers to plan transit trips that span multiple "systems" or services.

Now, in Google Transit, trip planning on Eureka Transit Service, Arcata & Mad River Transit Service, and Redwood Transit System (and soon to include Del Norte's Redwood Coast Transit!) is seamless, but all these agencies still have their own websites and printed schedules. In my view, that's confusing and unnecessary. Imagine, if you will, if you had to consult a different map or road atlas for Arcata's roads, Eureka's roads, the Humboldt County-maintained roads, and State DOT (Caltrans) highways — in short, use a different information source according to the agency responsible for maintaining the roads you are driving on. Probably, if this was reality, driving would not be nearly as popular as it is today! Or, imagine if you had to go to every individual airline's website to search for available flights and their prices instead of using Travelocity.com or something similar.

My dream is that there should be one website, maybe humtransit.org, that has timetables, maps, fares, rider alerts and news, and other important rider information for all the transit services in Humboldt County. With a map like this one that I created as a pilot project for Valley Metro in Phoenix Arizona, it should be possible to turn route overlays on and off, to see multiple routes on the map at the same time. HTA has given me the go-ahead to create a similar map for Redwood Transit System, and I'll be implementing something really cool for Lake Transit Authority very soon.

But even with well-integrated sources for transit information (I've empahasized online sources in this blog post because that's what I do, but printed schedules are equally, if not more, important), that only goes so far toward making transit more convenient. The next step is making sure service schedules line up so transfers are quick and seamless between services and routes. Unfortunately, Humboldt's current transit schedules fail to achieve this too often. Here's an example of a trip that goes from Sunny Brae to the Airport with an acceptable transfer wait of about 15 minutes to transfer from the Arcata & Mad River Transit Service Red Route to the Redwood Transit System mainline route. I've noticed that with the recent schedule updates, transfers between AMRTS and RTS have become a lot more convenient, but transfers between RTS and Blue Lake Rancheria Transit, for example, don't line up so well (many Northbound RTS buses leave just before the Blue Lake Bus arrives at the Arcata Transit Center).

It reminds me of a recent account of poorly coordinated transit systems in the Bay Area, "Missed Connections," in the Almanac. The author tried riding transit in the Bay Area, where there are about 26 major separate transit systems, for a whole week, but went back to driving largely because the lack of service schedule coordination made transit too slow and frustrating to use. Compare this circumstance to the one Portlanders enjoy with an integrated transit system run by Trimet, which serves all of Portland and many cities and suburbs outside of the city with buses and light rail. Service schedules are all arranged in an well-coordinated network-based system. This schedule information can be accessed in a variety of ways, on paper, and on their excellent, streamlined website at www.trimet.org (you'll notice certain design elements were borrowed for redwoodtransit.org).  And, not satisfied with their already exceptional website and passenger information resources, Trimet has launched maps.trimet.org in beta, which uses open source software to create an integrated view for the trip planner and route maps.  It should be noted that Trimet has been boasting of very impressive ridership gains recently, at least some of which can be attributed to the ease of using their system and information resources.

Integrating Humboldt's transit customer information resouces would be a first step towards increasing transit awareness and making transit easier to use (we've made progress over the last year, but could do more). The second step is improving service schedule coordination (again, I sense there's been some progress). The next steps will be creating an integrated brand for transit in Humboldt, like Lake, Del Norte, and Mendocino Counties, which will help people to understand the buses are an integrated transportation network. I recognize this would be a big change, but I think if it was done right, it could be a good one. This does not mean that local jurisdictions like Arcata would need to give up operational authority and control, however. It seems as if it should be able to join many operators into one marketable brand which is easy for people to understand and recongnize.