System Improvement Priorities

Following the division of Dots & Dashes budgets between existing system and network expansion improvements, groups were asked to identify specific improvements to the existing transit system; these decisions were to reflect the changes they’d like to see made using the amount of Dots & Dashes Dollars they’d assigned for that purpose. Several examples were provided, without assigning cost values. Groups were then asked to identify up to three separate priorities, without ranking them in priority order. The table below summarizes the results for this part of the exercise:

These existing system improvement priorities reflect participants’ general preferences for investment avenues. Major site-specific investments at a particular station, even if it were part of the current network, would be identified under the subsequent system expansion category. As these results indicate, fare modernization was the top priority among participants, particularly when combined with the related priority of “Cross-system fares,” aka fare interoperability. Also widely identified were higher frequencies & faster service, as well as an improvement in passenger information systems. No other specific improvement was identified by more than one group.