LYNX Service Change Initiative to Support Ridership

Target Audience: The Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority (LYNX) target audience for this entry was LYNX riders.

Strategy Objective:The main objective of this major service change was to offer our riders additional service options but also to realign our service routes which would allow our planning and transportation team to designate more time and effort to the routes where we saw an increase in ridership growth. Our strategy for our service change entailed facilitating three public hearings (in-person and virtually) and conducting community outreach initiatives at our station and other major stops to gain feedback on improvements needed. We utilized our 14,000 social media following (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) and placed notices on key bus stops and SuperStop terminals to notify our riders of any upcoming public hearings.

Situation Challenge: Each year LYNX has three service changes in April, August and December. Our 2021 December service change was our largest service update in more than a decade. With our ridership numbers at 60 percent of our pre-COVID-19 numbers, the new updates were done in an effort for us to improve our ridership and the customer's overall experience, particularly in high traffic areas.

Results Impact: As a result of this major service change, which included discontinuing low performing services, we are able to focus our efforts on improving our high demand areas. The realigning of our routes resulted in us being able increase our efficiency on direct routes to large employment areas (i.e. Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando, SeaWorld and Orlando International Airport). These updates will offer longer service hours on select routes to more neighborhoods to accommodate workers; it will provide easier connections to routes at transfer centers. In addition, it will benefit service efficiencies to help with operations and offer a more improved schedule analysis and adjustment to on-time performance. This initiative did not require any funding as everything was done in house.

Why Submit: While the pandemic has had an impact on our ridership numbers in the past year, it also offered a great opportunity for LYNX to hone in on some of the challenges that our riders and team were facing regarding efficiency and improvement in service routes. With a 49 percent change in our service routes, compared to a normal service change of 10-15 percent, this was our largest update in more than a decade. Additionally, our outreach efforts increased, as we created 60 flyers for our service change efforts (in English and Spanish) versus our normal service change flyers of two. We are confident that these new updates will help to elevate the customer experience and offer more efficiency moving forward.