Use of Geographical Information Systems as a Sketch Planning Tool to Replace Traditional Transit Route Planning Practice for College and University Communities

Effectiveness as a measure of a transit system’s ability to provide an adequate level of service, convenient locations, and characteristic services that meet the objectives and needs of riders, is an important parameter of transit evaluation. The ability of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to support transportation system operations, planning, and management has led the transit industry to employ it for effectiveness evaluation. In the majority of instances, GIS has been used as an enterprise application with adaptation of complex methodologies for data collection, processing and analysis. Not much attention has been given to date to the basic application of GIS as a simple sketch-plan tool for transit route planning and evaluation. This paper examined the development and implementation of GIS as a simple sketch-plan tool to conduct spatial analysis of land use, transit routes, student ridership and bus stop locations of transit systems in college towns in order to improve system effectiveness through low-cost key data collection. The methodology was applied to Tiger Transit of Auburn University in Alabama, which assists students commuting to and from the university. The implemented bus route changes based on the analysis results showed that the effectiveness of this transit system was significantly improved. Transit ridership increased by 23 percent from 13,000 to 16,000 riders per day. The transit routes were able to serve almost 90 percent of the student population with fewer buses, compared to 70 percent before the improvement. In addition, the transit system started to serve commercial locations such as malls, recreational locations, cinemas, and big box stores.