By Chris Zeilinger
Achieving Transit Frequency & Coverage in Smaller Cities
February 24, 2025
I’ll start this chapter with some reminiscences. In the mid 1970s, I was part of a summer program at California State University Bakersfield (CSUB). To get there, I’d ride with a friend from our small town in rural California to downtown Bakersfield, and he’d drop me off at a Golden Empire Transit (GET) bus stop on his way to work. I’d ride the GET bus to CSUB, do my collegiate stuff, and retrace the journey back home, doing this every weekday that summer. At that time, GET’s route to CSUB seemed to meander through every little neighborhood on the west side of Bakersfield, hardly ever picking up any passengers along the way. This made no sense to me, especially as I could’ve tossed a bike in my friend’s car and cycled to the CSUB campus in about half the time as the bus journey consumed. But I like buses, and summers in Bakersfield can be beastly. Nonetheless, that wandering bus route made no sense to me at all.
More recently, I was part of an effort to bring public transit to a city of around 36,000 population that had not enjoyed any transit service in many years. Although the budget was going to be limited, the city’s elected officials wanted a fixed-route bus system, and they really wanted this service to be available in every one of the seven council wards in the city. It didn’t work.
Ten years ago, the consultant and transit visionary Jarrett Walker spoke at CTAA’s annual conference. If you missed his remarks, you may have read his book, “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives,” or you may be following his “Human Transit” blog. And it’s possible that he, his firm, or followers of his way of looking at transit were busy redesigning urban public transit networks in a major city near you at some point in recent time, such as several consultants’ work in Winnipeg a couple of years ago.
In much of Jarrett’s work and writings, he explores the balance that transit planners try to achieve between generating ridership (such as through frequent, relatively rapid service along high-use corridors) and providing transit coverage (such as by maximizing the number of households, along with their major destinations, that are located near bus stops). It’s a tricky and imperfect balance to achieve, especially in medium- and small-size cities.
Golden Empire Transit revamped their bus routes in 1983, making the service to CSUB much more direct, among numerous (and continuing) system improvements. The seven council members in the unnamed small city mentioned above had to experience a bit of failure before launching a version of city-wide microtransit service in lieu of fixed-route transit. Just to clarify, neither one of these examples was a Jarrett Walker project. And as Jarrett told a room full of CTAA conference attendees in 2015, his methods of looking at a city and its public transit network play out differently in small cities, and may not even be helpful when looking at many rural areas’ transit networks.
With all of that in mind, let’s look at how transit frequency and coverage are addressed in two very different small cities.
Capital Transit: Greatness Along the Gastineau
In 2003, CTAA celebrated Juneau’s Capital Transit as its “Transit System of the Year.” There were good reasons for that recognition. Alaska’s state capital has an urban population of 24,756 (add in the people who live in Juneau’s less-urban portions and its remote and roadless areas, and the total population is 32,255), and boasts a 9-route city-run transit system that provided 713,103 unlinked passenger trips in 2023. If you’ve been keeping score, that’s 28.81 UPT per capita in urban Juneau, which is pretty remarkable for a place of this size.
A number of things make Juneau special, in ways that point toward transit as part of the city’s key to economic viability. Juneau is isolated, with no roads connecting it to anyplace else in Alaska or Canada. The built-up portions of the city are fairly compact, being squeezed between the Pacific waters of Gastineau Channel and the mountains that rise up from the waters’ edge.
Between its physical constraints and its isolation, there is limited buildable land in Juneau; this drives up costs of living, especially for housing (the costs associated with owner-occupied housing in Juneau are about 40 percent higher than U.S. averages), but most non-housing costs are about 27 percent above US averages. In general, wages in Juneau are about 29 percent above U.S. averages, and 62.7 percent of Juneauites are in the workforce (slightly above the national average of 60.6 percent of population in the workforce), which helps assure that the city is fairly solidly in the U.S. middle class. As further evidence of Juneau’s middle-class status, only 8.2 percent of its population lives in poverty; in comparison, 12.5 percent of the overall US population lives in poverty.
Despite being a city comprised largely of middle-class homeowners, there is an economic pain point in Juneau: as mentioned above, housing costs are 40 percent above national averages, yet wages are only 29 percent above average. We therefore see that Juneau has taken on a key characteristic found more commonly in Canada: an income-constrained middle-class population. Digging a little deeper, one encounters an interesting data gem: 9.2 percent of employed people in Juneau commute to their jobs by foot, bike or transit, which is significantly more than the comparable figure of 6.4 percent of all U.S. workers who commute by foot, bike or transit. The City and Borough of Juneau uses buses and sidewalks to make its residents’ middle-class lifestyles possible.
Capital Transit is directly operated by the City and Borough of Juneau. Its 2025 operating budget of $9.1 million is a line item in the city’s budget. Passenger fares and related income generate $581,000 of the needed revenue, $1.0 million of the $9.3 million in marine passenger fees collected from visiting cruise ships are used to help support the transit budget, together with $1.5 million in state and federal transit funds; the remaining $6.0 million of Capital Transit’s current operating budget is covered through the city’s general revenues.
Since nearly all the residents of Juneau’s urban area live within a half-mile of a Capital Transit bus stop, it’s fairly easy to blanket the city with transit, even though there are only a handful of bus routes. Thus, the “coverage” element of the transit formula is readily satisfied in Juneau.
Except for three limited-schedule “commuter” routes and a couple of currently suspended circulator routes, all of Capital Transit’s service is along a single corridor. From downtown Juneau north along Glacier Highway to Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley, buses run on 15-minute headways in both directions on weekdays, with reduced frequency on weekends. Between downtown and Juneau’s Douglas neighborhood, the buses run on 30-minute headways. This frequency of service is rare in most U.S. urban areas, and is exceptionally unusual among U.S. rural transit operations, but it’s the key to generating ridership in Juneau, and it’s the key to providing transit service that is available and attractive to Juneau’s transit-using population.
As a result of this service, and the city’s willingness to invest in this service, Juneau satisfies both the “coverage” and the “frequency” sides of the transit challenge we presented at the beginning of this chapter.
CyRide: Central Iowa’s Ticket to Prosperity
The city of Ames, Iowa, has none of Juneau’s geographical constraints. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of this city and its 66,427 residents is that it’s home to Iowa State University (ISU) and more than 30,000 ISU students.
Among U.S. urban areas having populations between 50,000 and 200,000, Ames routinely tops the charts in terms of transit use per capita. The urban area’s 2020 population was 66,342, and the local transit services (the city-operated “CyRide” fixed-route bus system, with the regional Heart of Iowa Regional Transit Agency providing CyRide’s paratransit service) delivered more than 4.5 million unlinked passenger trips in 2023. We’ll see if they accomplish this intensive level of transit use through “frequency,” “coverage,” or both, in a moment, but let’s first take a bit more of a look at the community.
As befits a small city with a large university, 27.7 percent of the population is between the ages of 20 and 24. That’s not a surprise for a university-centric city, but is atypical for most U.S. cities. Housing and other costs of living are lower in Ames than in most of the U.S. Rental housing prices stand out: the median rental price in Ames is $993 per month at last report, compared to the U.S. average of $1,406 per month. Other costs of living are at or below average, but not as dramatically as rental housing. However, median household income in Ames is $58,963, which is about 75 percent of the nationwide median household income. That’s significant.
Also significant is that nearly 25 percent of Ames’ population lives at or below poverty. Most of these people in poverty are ISU students with little or no earned income, which helps drive them toward relying on CyRide’s buses. Interestingly, more than 61 percent of Ames’ residents are in the workforce (that’s slightly above the national average), but the majority of Ames residents with jobs are working part-time. That means there are a lot of limited-income people (mainly, but not entirely, ISU students) who need to get to campus for their studies and collegiate activities, and also need to get to a part-time job to earn the modest income they can earn. Even if they have a car (about 3,000 Ames residents do not have cars), their cost consciousness may cause them to eschew the car, using CyRide or other means to get around. In fact, 11.2 percent of Ames residents commute to work via transit, bike or foot, which is significantly greater than the national average of 6.4 percent of commuters relying on transit, their bike, or their own two feet for getting to work.
If you look at the city of Ames’ annual budget, transit dominates the ledger. CyRide has the most employees of any city department or function in Ames, and the CyRide budget ($15.5 million in 2024) is the second-greatest line item in the Ames city budget, exceeded only by the budget for the city-owned electric utility. A transit-dedicated property tax generates $2.1 million, state and federal transit funding streams respectively provide $1.2 million and $3.9 million, fares paid by non-ISU passengers account for $200,000 of CyRide’s budget, and ISU chips in $6.7 million to support CyRide, mainly through fees collected by ISU’s student government. Various other bits of funding round out the city’s CyRide budget.
That kind of transit investment results in a 13-route bus network, and the majority of these routes operate with headways of 15 minutes or less. Clearly, frequency is a defining element of the transit landscape in Ames.
As for coverage, almost every place in the Ames urban area is within a half-mile of a CyRide bus stop. The only real exception is that the largely commercial and industrial area of Ames east of the Skunk River’s south fork, “East Ames,” is served by a special CyRide on-demand service, rather than fixed-route transit. The northernmost and southernmost parts of Ames receive transit service on 30-minute headways, a frequency that many cities this size would love to enjoy, but which seems dawdling for Ames, where the average systemwide headway is under 18 minutes.
Frequency vs Coverage: Is There a Contest?
If Juneau and Ames are any indication, the answer, at least among smaller cities that invest heavily in their transit programs, is that you can achieve both frequency and coverage to the satisfaction of your city’s transit-interested population. It doesn’t have to be a trade-off.
In both of these cities, there are some spotting features of greatness that future chapters will explore in more detail. Those include:
- Taking advantage of geography and compactness in the provision of transit,
- Providing transit as a valued amenity for the middle-class residents of the city,
- Leveraging transit as a solution to overcome – quietly – the economic pain points of middle-class life in the city, such as Juneau’s unusually high housing costs, or the income constraints that bedevil college students in Ames (just like dozens of other campus communities around the U.S.),
- Employing robust, non-volatile financing structures that the entire community supports in various ways, and for which the entire community is supportive, and
- Enmeshing the transit program with local government and local officials, whether by housing the transit securely within city or county government, or by having localities and their officials regularly supporting and engaging with the transit program.
The above points will be discussed at greater length in due course. In the next chapter, though, we’re going to examine one of the deep, generally unspoken, secrets of public transit in the U.S.
The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) and its members believe that mobility is a basic human right. From work and education to life-sustaining health care and human services programs to shopping and visiting with family and friends, mobility directly impacts quality of life.