PART Market Areas
Using Operations Dashboard for Transit Planning
For a transit agency, a rideshed represents the geographic location from which passengers could access their service. For PART, this includes park & ride lots, transit terminals, and bus stops. The purpose of the system analysis project was to delineate the market area for the PART system, analyze demographic data inside each rideshed, and collect origin-destination data for each rideshed. I wanted to create a series of dashboards to view the data and then embed each dashboard into an ArcGIS Story Map. The final product is at the bottom of this page.
The first step in this project was to identify the rideshed for each park & ride lot. We had just completed a park & ride survey completed in mid-2018. I utilized a free geocoder from Texas A&M University and I plotted the home location of PART's passengers by which park & ride facility they parked their car. The results were circular shapes around urban park & ride facilities while more rural lots were fan shaped. What we learned from this is that because urban lots are more central, they attract passengers from a wider area while the rural lots primarily had passengers coming from upstream. In the survery results, there were very few examples of passengers traveling from downstream to access a park & lot.
The next step was to analyze the demographic data for the rideshed. For this, I noted variables of interest from the 2014-2018 5-year estimates of the American Community Survey. Using the Census API and a Jupyter Notebook, I requested the individual variables and transformed the data. I brought the Census data into ArcGIS Pro for geoprocessing where I developed a short Python script. I then created a web map and dashboard to display the demographpic data. This dashboard is used when PART staff are writing grant applications and they need demographic figures for the entire PART system or an individual route.
When route planning, it is important to look at origin-destination data so the planner knows where people are coming from and going. OnTheMap is a great tool to use and download OD data from. Each rideshed polygon was analyzed in OnTheMap and the results were exported and loaded into ArcGIS Pro. I created two dashboards that are located on the LEHD Jobs tabs in the Story Map.
(Elements on the dashboards can appear compressed on smaller screens. The elements are resizable.)