Foursquare ITP worked with MARTA to advance their environmental review for this BRT corridor that serves the ATL airport through the evaluation of alternatives, conceptual project design, station planning, and ridership and cost modeling. MARTA’s desire to quickly advance BRT in this priority corridor required detailed alternative evaluation supported by robust operational analysis to provide accurate ridership and costs for FTA grant applications.
Foursquare ITP supported the evaluation of alternatives, conceptual project design, station planning, and ridership and cost modeling by creating GTFS feeds for all scenarios and developing factors for limited-stop service and bus priority treatments to quickly and accurately develop BRT operating speeds. Using Foursquare ITP’s GTFS and bus priority expertise, our Reflect tool, and Podaris software, we were able to quickly create and validate GTFS and BRT alternative speeds for modeling. We also generated operating statistics, O&M cost estimates, and fleet requirements for all scenarios.
Despite the challenges of a post-Covid drop in ridership, the Foursquare ITP project team developed a BRT alternative that is competitive for nearly $70 million in federal CIG funds.
Solutions and Outcomes
- Developed BRT alternative that is competitive for $70 million CIG funding.
- Developed accurate GTFS feeds for all BRT scenarios using our Reflect GTFS validator and GTFS editors.
- Developed BRT speed estimates that account for stop density and priority treatments.
- Generated operating statistics, operations and maintenance cost estimates, and fleet requirements.