Nashville Post

Nashville-area mass transit — in our city’s case, almost exclusively buses — should be (and this is no surprise) convenient, dependable, frequent and safe, according to residents who participated in the first phase of a year-long strategic planning process known as nMotion 2015

The Metro Transit Authority (MTA) and Regional Transportation Authority of Middle Tennessee (RTA) today released findings of the poll, which yielded more than 3,500 responses and 26 characteristics (including the aforementioned four) local mass transit users value.

“To begin the public outreach process, we wanted to identify the types of broad values that should guide our planning process as we develop a transit system for the future,” Steve Bland, CEO of MTA/RTA, said in a release. “The findings on values will be used by our transit planners as they assess the types of needs residents have identified and the changes to the system that will be contemplated. This is just the first step in a yearlong process, and we encourage everyone in the Nashville area to get involved.”

Findings of interest include:

• Those who don’t rely on transit cite “convenient” most often. Forty-five percent of the survey respondents said they never use public transportation, and 30 percent of the respondents use the system less than once per week. These groups chose convenience as their top value, with 39 percent naming it their first priority. Among this group, “safety” received the second-most votes for top value, with 12 percent.
• Those who do ride transit cite “dependable” most often. Of the 25 percent of respondents who said they ride transit regularly, 33 percent named “dependable” as their top value, followed by “convenient” with 22 percent.

After identifying their top values, residents were then asked how they define them. A summary of those definitions is below.

• Convenient: Provide more frequent service and service to more locations.
• Dependable: Transit service is on time.
• Frequent: Service is expected to come every 15 minutes on both major and minor routes.
• Safe: Make it easier to walk to and from stops, with more sidewalks, crosswalks and signals, and locate stops in well-lit areas.

MTA/RTA will use the technical work and the public input to create guiding principles for the project, which will be used to direct MTA/RTA as it considers future improvements to our transit system. This document will be released to the public at the end of this month.

“Our goal is to synthesize the input from the public and what we know about our system today to create a broad vision for our region,” Bland said. “Once we have a vision, we can begin to examine and collect feedback on specific strategies and future scenarios to improve our transit system.”