Coast RTA begins analyzing route efficiency, customer satisfaction
Coast RTA kicked off a corridor study Tuesday with a transit task force that will examine the efficiency, accuracy and customer satisfaction of its 10 routes.
The study is a requirement of the funding agreement Coast RTA has with Horry County, its largest local funding source. County Council outlined guidelines it wants the transit to meet in order to receive its $1.05 million annual payment.
Coast RTA is working with TransPro Consulting to administer the corridor study, which will look at whether Coast’s routes are in the right places, whether the buses are being sent at the right times of the day and how satisfied their customers are.
Ryan Gallivan, senior consultant with TransPro, said at Tuesday’s transit task force meeting that the strategy to assess the routes is implementing a corridor study.
“What a corridor study does is it looks at all of the community dynamics that would impact means of transportation,” Gallivan said. “Things such as where do people live, where do they work, where are the areas where people don’t have any cars, etcetra. And then see how well the services are aligned with those areas of demand. The idea is to look at the forces in the community that will create demand for public transportation and then see if our routes are satisfying them.”
Felicia Beaty, chief operating officer for Coast, said if the study creates changes to the fixed routes, it can also impact a federally mandated program that requires the transit to provide up-to-the-door service to those with disabilities within three-fourths of a mile of fixed routes.
The program can be costly for Coast. Each stop can cost the company more than $30.
“The ultimate goal at the end of the day is to get people off of those buses and onto the fixed route buses,” Beaty said.
Julie Norton-Dew, interim CEO and general manager for Coast, said the board of directors will finalize a contract for the study with TransPro at its Jan. 28 board meeting. From there, the transit task force, which is made up of community leaders in various industries including health care, solid waste, education and social services, will meet three more times before the study is finished.
The last time a study like this was completed was 2010, and Norton-Dew said analyzing routes is part of Coast’s regular practices.
“On an annualized basis, we look at the performance of the routes from the year before from a bottom-line financial basis, and look at adjusting the budget for the next year based on performance,” Norton-Dew said. “The budget is continuously affected by the performance of the routes.”
For example, in 2014 compared to 2013, ridership and service hours are down, but the transit’s boardings-per-hour increased, she said.
“So, there’s an analytical where you just can’t look at the raw data, you have to look at other factors,” Norton-Dew said. “We have that data.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2015 at 6:51 PM with the headline "Coast RTA begins analyzing route efficiency, customer satisfaction."