MMT provides public transit services within the city of Colorado Springs and its surrounding areas, known as Olympic City USA — home to the U.S. Olympics committee headquarters. The city filled with national pride and fighting spirit felt defeated when the 2008 recession hit and heavily impacted their transit system.
The 2008 recession led to significant budget cuts, which reduced MMT’s services by a third. “In 2010, we really did have a bare bones transit system,” said Craig Blewitt, Director of Mountain Metropolitan Transit, City of Colorado Springs. “We only operated Monday to Friday, 255 days a year. Most routes also had a headway of 60 minutes.”
MMT wanted to improve the quality of service by increasing their service coverage and improve the frequency of service for their community which would result in an increase in ridership.
Utilizing data from on-time performance and the productivity of routes, MMT developed a long range transit plan to improve their service. “Trapeze was huge in terms of having information available to help us make informed decisions,” said Blewitt. “Working with the data, we know the productivity and OTP of routes and it was using those pieces of information that were key to us in going forward and serving the community right. Our IT and planning staff worked through all that information and helped synthesize that for our ultimate decisions going forward.”
"Working with the data, we know the productivity and OTP of routes and it was using those pieces of information that were key to us in going forward and serving the community."
Results
MMT leveraged route and on-time performance data to better understand which area had a good density of ridership. As a result, they were able to improve their existing services and expand their service area with various partnerships. For example, they revamped two of their bus routes and separated them into four shorter routes. This enabled them to deliver faster travel times for their passengers and improved the overall on-time performance.
Another part of their plan was to increase the frequency of their services. By increasing their bus service to 15 minute intervals for their north-south corridor, passengers got to where they needed to go, faster.
“We’ve been laser focused on improving our OTP – that, high frequency and good travel times is key to our riders,” Blewitt said. As a result, from 2015 to 2016, they added 19% to their revenue service hours and increased the days of service from 255 to 362.
As a result, MMT won the 2016 Large Community Transit Agency of the Year from the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies. “The reason we received the award is because of the amount of service that we were able to add,” said Blewitt. “It’s exciting when you have an opportunity to grow and that you do it right.
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