Owen Sound: From Transit Budgets to Ride Targets

Description and use

Transit planners now have an interactive calculator that links a fixed-route budget to hours, trips, and choices, including evening and weekend on‑demand service, and allows flexible allocation of ride targets between buses and rideshare.

Problem

Transit planners need to link a fixed‑route budget to the hours, trips, and choices it can support across the week, including evening and weekend on‑demand service.

Outcome

The calculator now supports flexible planning of evening and weekend on‑demand service, selectable service mixes, and adjustable ride targets, enabling planners to compare bus‑only, rideshare‑only, and combined scenarios within a shared annual target framework.

Workflow

• Define phased bus budget with vehicle‑hour, cost, and boarding targets
• Add on‑demand service windows and calculate vehicle‑hours and net cost per window
• Introduce selectable service mix (bus only, rideshare only, combined) and preserve zero‑core bus option
• Add annual ride target input per window and scale vehicle‑hours, costs, and fares accordingly
• Implement shared‑target slider to allocate a default annual target between buses and rideshare
• Validate with unit tests, type checks, deployment workflows, and browser checks

Evidence

Transit planners need to connect a service budget to the hours, trips, and choices it can support across the week.

Source

The first phase described weekday evening bus service across four routes: roughly hourly service until 10 p.m., five days a week.

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On October 20, the first on‑demand scenario change added evening and weekend windows to the cost model.

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The next October 20 commits added independently selectable scheduled buses and on‑demand rideshare.

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Later that day, the demand‑led update let a planner set an annual ride target for each on‑demand window.

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By November 2, the model had separate mode choices and editable window targets.

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