The Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT) called for public feedback on potential strategies and actions for its long-range plan for public transit.
The new plan seeks to coordinate planning, programming, and technical assistance for transit operations at the local level throughout Iowa. Given that it is all about coordination, IDOT seeks the plan to be collaborative from the onset. When complete, it will reflect the understanding of current trends, identify needs and gaps both current and upcoming, and present potential means of addressing those needs with the resources at hand. In essence, it provides a foundation for IDOT to build off as they monitor the developing situation year after year.
Along with broader visions of the future, the plan will take into account analyses of demographic, economic and ridership data; condition assessments and stakeholder input; actions and initiatives to be utilized by the department and its partners; calculations of anticipated capital, operating costs and revenue; and discussions of funding shortfalls, programming future investments, as well as continuous performance monitoring.
The survey launched to support this will help IDOT decide which investments and strategies to focus on, by first figuring out what the public thinks the future of public transport should be. Its questions will, therefore, focus on how people want to live and travel in the future and what they think of certain transit strategies. The survey opened last week on the IDOT website and will be open through Nov. 1, 2019.