Getting passengers back on-board: LA Metro’s road to recovery.

In March of 2020, with COVID-19 spreading fast and stay-at-home orders in place, everything changed in Los Angeles (LA) County. Roads that had been congested for the better part of the past century emptied. Our local skies cleared, freed from smog. More than half of LA Metro’s riders were suddenly gone – and stayed gone for the next year, leaving some to wonder what, if any, future awaited transit in our region.

We are well on our way to recovery from the pandemic. In October 2022, our ridership reached 72.5 per cent of pre-pandemic levels – the highest we have seen since the pandemic began”

Now, I’m pleased to report that we are well on our way to recovery from the pandemic. In October 2022, our ridership reached 72.5 per cent of pre-pandemic levels – the highest we have seen since the pandemic began, and we’re making good progress toward our ambitious goal recovering our pre-pandemic ridership by 1 July 2023. At LA Metro, we’re recovering our ridership because we’re listening to the needs of our customers, we’re making service improvements through a gender and equity lens and we’re putting people first.

Putting people first

For LA Metro, putting people first is more than just a catchy mantra; it’s an organising principle that applies to our riders and the employees who deliver our service. Putting people first means making our service friendlier, cleaner, faster, more dependable, more family oriented and more reflective of how people travel today – and it’s working.?

During the pandemic, we took the opportunity to implement our new NextGen bus plan, to maximise our customers’ access to jobs and destinations of interest.?Today with NextGen, 1.1 million more jobs are now accessible through very frequent, 10-minute or better, bus service. This represents a 350 per cent improvement over our pre-pandemic service structure. NextGen also increased our customers’ access to key destinations, likes grocery stores, educational institutions, parks and medical centres, and it focused the improvements in communities that need to use transit most.

NextGen doesn’t just align our service to where people are travelling today – it also aligns our service with who is traveling today.?Before NextGen, our bus system didn’t really consider how women, who are half of the bus riding population, use our system differently from men. It’s my belief that if we orient our service around the needs of women and families, we’ll be more successful in growing ridership.?We know from previous studies that women make more frequent trips, go to different destinations, and tend to travel more during the off-peak period than men, so, to meet their needs, we increased our frequent midday service and created more opportunities for shorter, faster transit trips.?

We also enhanced customer service and safety through adding Metro Ambassadors to the system, a key priority for our female riders. More than 150 Metro?Ambassadors have been deployed so far on our system, to support our riders, connect those who need it to resources and report issues on the system to make sure we can address them quickly. This is a key part of our newly re-imagined, layered and people-centric approach to public safety.

Source - https://www.intelligenttransport.com/