Transit service plan in development

Monika Garza | The Rider

The City of Brownsville has hired a transportation planning firm to develop a five-year plan to identify service gaps, needs and opportunities to improve its transit services.

The comprehensive study, which will cost about $180,000, will improve transit service in Brownsville, said Norma Zamora, B Metro director.

“[Nelson Nygaard] is going to be conducting a study of comprehensive operational analysis of all our services to give us a recommendation on what is working, what improvements could be made and how we could improve our services,” Zamora said.

The five-year plan will be completed in July 2017.

On Nov. 2 and 3, representatives from Nelson Nygaard conducted public meetings on both UTRGV campuses regarding how to improve transportation services in the community.

James Gamez, a senior associate at Nelson Nygaard, said the purpose of the plan is to learn how to manage and serve transit services in the community.

“Because the city has a limited amount of resources, we are trying to help them to come up with the balance of how to manage their service and how to make it also convenient and attractive to the community,” he said. “So, this is really the first step in the project.”

History senior Rodrigo Moreno said the Brownsville transit system helps students travel from one campus to the other.

“I think that it helps to connect the students who don’t have cars that have to take courses in Edinburg,” Moreno said. “It takes a while to get there, but it’s good for the people that do not have cars.”

Gamez said the study will look at how the routes are designed, how the schedules are laid out, what the connections look like and the ridership patterns at the system, route and bus stop levels.

“So, we know at every single bus stop, how many people are getting on and off the bus,” he said.

Gamez noted some of the weaknesses present in the transportation system.

“Right now, what we observed and what we heard from people is that some of the routes, it takes a long time to get there—where they want to go. … Another thing is reliability. Sometimes, buses break down because some of the buses are older buses. … Also, the evening service is a big thing heard from students, that if you have a late class you can’t catch the bus because the last Metro Connect is at 7:30 p.m.”

Asked how much it will cost to implement the changes, Zamora replied: “That will be dependent on the recommendations of the study.”

Boris Palchik, a principal at Nelson Nygaard, said the plan aims to improve the weaknesses of the transportation system and make it better.

“There are certain guiding principles that can improve transit service for everybody and if we can implement those guiding principles, we think that it will make a better system. So, at the top of that list of guiding principles is that service should be simple,” he said. “Things like having better passenger information, things like having more direct routes, things like having new transport opportunities; those are all important features that we think will help reduce the barriers.”

Zamora said the last comprehensive study was made 23 years ago.

“We are very grateful that we have the opportunity to get this comprehensive study,” she said. “The last comprehensive study that was done on the services that were provided by Brownsville Metro was back in 1993. So, we haven’t had a full analysis of the services since then. So, we are very excited and hopeful to be able to have some good recommendations that we would be able to move forward with.”