How We Used Data to Design an Equitable Bus Network

We measured the quantity of our bus service using the Revenue Vehicle Miles (RVM) metric. RVM tells us just how much service we are running and shows how many miles buses travel in our system.

The RVM of a single bus route, for example, would be the length of that route multiplied by the number of buses that travel along that route each day. More frequent bus service would have a larger RVM.

Compare the RVM of our current and proposed bus network

We used the coverage standard in our Service Delivery Policy (SDP) to measure how far riders live from a transit stop or station.

We measure coverage in two ways:

• Base coverage determines the percent of residents living within 0.5 miles of any transit service
• Frequent service coverage determines the percent of residents living within 0.5 miles of service that runs every 15 minutes on weekdays and every 20 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays

View a map of our proposed bus network coverage results

What is "competitive" transit?

Transit competitiveness accounts for different factors that make people more or less likely to choose transit for a trip. Those factors include service frequency, the number of transfers you have to make, how far you have to walk, and how long you need to wait for your bus.

We measured our bus network's competitiveness using the following metrics: 

• Trip coverage looks at all the trips that are already being made in the region on all modes (including by car). It shows how many of those people have a competitive transit option in our current network and in the proposed network
• Regional access evaluates the percent of all residents in the region that can access a single set of "regional destinations," such as Downtown Boston and the Longwood Medical Area, using a competitive transit option
• Local access evaluates the percent of all residents in the region that can access their own unique set of "local destinations," such as pharmacies and grocery stores, using a competitive transit option

Our current bus network is complex—some routes have multiple variants, don't run on all days of the week, and have dramatic scheduled frequency changes. One of our goals with the network redesign is to simplify the system.

We asked the following questions to evaluate each route in our current and proposed network to see whether it was simple enough to use: 

• Are service frequencies relatively consistent all day every day?
• Is service available every single day of the week?
• Does the bus regularly take different paths?

Compare simple routes in our current and proposed bus network