The Fast Transit Program is an agency-wide effort to make transit faster, more reliable, and ultimately more useful for Santa Clara County travelers.
The program is identifying where and how transit priority, streamlining, and policy changes can benefit service throughout the system, with a focus on VTA's most frequent routes. Such improvements can help make transit an attractive mode choice for people to travel to work, school, and daily needs, and can also help Santa Clara County cities meet their mobility goals all while helping to reduce VTA’s operating costs.
The Program has three...
The Fast Transit Program is an agency-wide effort to make transit faster, more reliable, and ultimately more useful for Santa Clara County travelers.
The program is identifying where and how transit priority, streamlining, and policy changes can benefit service throughout the system, with a focus on VTA's most frequent routes. Such improvements can help make transit an attractive mode choice for people to travel to work, school, and daily needs, and can also help Santa Clara County cities meet their mobility goals all while helping to reduce VTA’s operating costs.
The Program has three major components:
- The development and adoption of a transit speed policy that represents VTA’s commitment to work internally and with local jurisdictions to improve transit speed and reliability (completed 2019)
- An examination of the causes of VTA’s declining speeds and reliability (completed 2019)
- A program of context-sensitive short- and long-term speed improvement projects
Why does VTA need the Fast Transit Program?
VTA’s average transit speed is slowing
The average speed of VTA’s transit vehicles has declined 20% over the past 30 years. When transit speeds decline, on-time reliability suffers, and transit becomes less appealing to riders.
Furthermore, slowing routes become increasingly more expensive to operate since VTA must add more buses and trains to maintain the same frequency of service. This is especially concerning on VTA’s highest ridership routes in the frequent network, which are among the slowest in the system, particularly during peak periods. If the average speed of the frequent network improves by just 1 mile per hour, it would reduce annual operating costs by over $15M per year.
Causes of slowing speeds
While increased congestion slows down transit the same way it impacts low capacity vehicles, transit vehicles suffer from many other sources of delay that compound along the route and are difficult to recover from such as frequent stopping to pick up and drop off passengers, then merging back into traffic or waiting at signals to access a bus stop.
Solutions for slowing speeds
Speeding up transit requires a multi-pronged approach across the frequent network to address the many different sources of delay that compound along a transit route. We identified a suite of complementary strategies to help reduce the different sources of delay that, over time, should maximize speed improvements. VTA is working with local jurisdictions to explore and implement some of these tools, such as transit signal priority to help provide more green lights for buses; balance bus stop spacing to efficiently pick up and drop off passengers, expedite boarding to reduce the time spent at a stop, and bus lanes to help move buses through the most congested areas. Ultimately, success of faster transit relies on close coordination and partnership with the cities in which VTA operates..
Speed improvement projects in progress
Transit Signal Priority
VTA is actively working with local jurisdictions on several projects to improve existing transit signal priority for bus and light rail; expand transit signal priority to more routes; and test innovative transit signal priority technology that could help make expansion, improvements, and operations and maintenance of transit signal technology more effective. Project information coming soon.
Bus Stop Balancing
In early 2021 VTA will implement the first phase of bus stop balancing on routes 56, 66, 68 with the goal to make these routes more efficient for our passengers. This effort will help us learn about the synergy between bus stop balancing and other speed improvements in the program, learn about implementation, refine analysis methods, and inform future bus stop balancing efforts.
Expedited Boarding – information coming soon
Board Memos
- May 3, 2018 VTA Board of Directors Meeting – Item 6.21 Fast Transit Program
- March 7, 2019 VTA Board of Directors Meeting – Item 6.2 Transit Speed Policy
- April 4, 2019 VTA Board of Directors Meeting – Item #6.21 Fast Transit Program Speed and Reliability Methodology