7/16/23: Wayfinding Survey, Baypass saved at UC Berkeley, and Community Grant Program
This week’s newsletter is full of good news and opportunities for transit fun!
Due Monday 7/17 - Bay Area Wayfinding Survey:
Signs, maps, bumps in the sidewalk, sound cues - all of these are wayfinding tools that help people use transit to navigate where they are going. The Bay Area (Metropolitan Transportation Commission with transit agencies) is conducting a project to improve public transportation wayfinding to make transit more convenient.
Can you take this 6-minute survey to help develop a new and improved wayfinding system in the Bay Area. The survey runs through July 17th.
Due Monday 7/17 - Transit Month Community Grant Deadline:
Community Grant Applications have now been extended to July 17th at 11:59pm, with awarded groups notified by July 21st.
As a reminder, Seamless Bay Area and San Francisco Transit riders are co-leading Transit Month again this year - a month of activities and contests in September organized by dozens of groups across the region to celebrate transit.
This year we’ll be offering grants of $500-$1,000 to community-based organizations to cover costs associated with planning and hosting of Transit Month events. There is a short application that can be found here, including the criteria for grants. Help spread the word to organizations you think would be interested in this grant!
Good news from the Baypass All-Agency Pilot:
UC Berkeley and UAW 2865 have come to an agreement preserving the university’s participation in the Baypass Pilot Program. Some 12,000 students were at risk of losing access to a transit pass providing access to all transit services in the Bay Area. The program is a testing ground for an integrated regional fare system and the results have been promising, with participants with an all-agency pass taking on average 35% more trips than their peers with a single-agency pass.
MTC just released a new video to commemorate the 1-year anniversary of the Baypass Program with jubilant testimony from students, low-income housing residents, university and public leaders.
Network Management 1st meeting :
A hallmark of regions around the world with well-coordinated transit is having a network management body responsible for ensuring a coordinated system. The Bay Area took an important step forward last Friday with the inaugural meeting of the Regional Network Management Committee.
The committee will meet monthly, and will pay close attention to a range of transit network coordination initiatives including mapping and wayfinding, fare and payment integration, and network coordination. This committee is composed of nine policymakers from the Metropolitan Transportation Committee, two representatives of elected transit boards - Diane Shaw of AC Transit and Janice Li of BART - and a representative of the California State Transportation Agency.
Staff leadership for network management will include an executive manager from MTC, other staff who work for MTC and transit agencies. There will be a “Voice of the Customer” advisory group that will meet for the first time in September.
This committee was established based on recommendations from the Blue Ribbon Transit Recovery Task Force and the Network Management Business Case Advisory Group Seamless Bay Area supported this useful step, and also supports further steps to deliver seamless transit in a nimble and reliable manner.
