Gis Proposal

Promoting Public Transportation

While Integrating it with Special Events

By Kerr Gelvin

Summary

Special events cause traffic problems and crowd control of people would be easier if public transportation were used more. Special events are a great place to advertise the use of public transportation. By reorganizing the public transportation to accommodate special events and advertising intensively many problems could be solve, while providing a useful service to the public.

The scope of the project will include many departments. The Department of Parks and Recreation, under the Guidance of the Community Outreach Leader will work with the Department of Public Transportation to coordinate with event planners for special events. The project is focused on delivering 8 weeks before an event an organized public transit system plan to ferry people to and from a venue, then to advertise the great use and convenience of the public transit. The event will occur on week 9 and week 10 will be spent reviewing and cataloging the plan.

Budget:

Item Cost Reason

Salaries… $170,000 we need a high quality team
Advertising… $70,000 the project depends highly on informing the public
Hardware/software $0 Their should be computers using ArcMap accessible The implementation of a Public Transportation System for special events coupled with advertising for it will increase the use of the PTS and help the community. It will be a great marketing tool for the public transit and fulfill the job description for Community Outreach Program leader to further the use of public transit and at the same time provide a safer service fro the community.

Introduction

The city of Tempe has an extensive public transportation network. It also contains many venues for special events, such as the Sun Devils Stadium, and Diablo Stadium. There is a need to reorganize public transportation to accommodate large events such as a free Pro-Football game attended by many people that would use the public transportation system. This problem has two sides, one is a need to know where such an event is, where people are and how many people will attend it using public transportation; the other side of the problem is communicating to the right people that the bus line, or in the future the Light Rail System, has been modified to accommodate the special event. Details that would need to be advertised are, for example, more busses on a route spaced out every 5 minutes instead of every 15 minutes or even new routes and new pick up locations. The solution to this need is an accessible geo-database and application set up for people to input variables such as what venue is holding the event, expected turnout, and which people could use the public transportation to get there. These variables would be attained with the cooperation of the organizers of the event, and the advertising of the public transportation should be part of the advertising for the event. GIS has been used for public transportation in many different ways, and as Community Outreach Program Leader advertising the use of public transportation, but the combination of public outreach and temporally reorganizing public transportation to meet special occasion does not have the history it deserves. Transportation uses GIS for special events to reorganize traffic lights in order to alleviate traffic. To see a product that provides this service visit http://www.iteris.com/ts/software/systemview.html or http://www.edcsolutions.com/transportation.htm. What makes this project unique is the integration of pre-event traffic planning and including public transportation. The advantages of having such an application in place are plentiful. As Community Outreach Program Leader, one of my concerns is advertising the use of the Public Transit System (PTS); the attention of the special event and the advertising of the public transit as a hassle free way to get to and from an event, and not worry about a designated driver would increase awareness of public transit. This in turn may increase use of the PTS and reduce long-term traffic. Short term traffic around events is another problem; with PTS coordinating with the special events and the proper advertising that short-term traffic may also be reduced, decreasing the stress of the spectators and ergo the stress on the police at the special events. With a planned drop of location the crowd control in and out of the venue would also be easier for the police; both of these factors may mean less man power per event, which would mean less cost to the city. Another important benefit is the reduction of Driving Under the Influence (DUI) associated with people driving home after events. Less DUIs means less accidents and less police manpower wasted on senseless death. The venue would also benefit from such a system in place. More attendance would mean higher revenues for the venue and ergo the city through taxes. The venue would also need less parking for attendants. The accessibility of handicapped people to the events would also be increased, as busses and all city PTS are handicapped accessible. Problems associated with special events can be solved with better planning and organization from GIS. Getting people to use public transportation for special events may lead them to use PTS for everyday uses, would be a great boost to the cities efficiency. Solving the hassles of traffic around special events by drawing more people to those events on organized PTS, and creating a situation where better crowd control measures around large events can better be managed would benefit everyone and help reduce stress and possible crime (after game riots) around those special events.

Project Description

Timeline:
Week 1 – Find good people from Public Transit, and various GIS trained specialist to help develop and implement this project and find office with equipment for this project.
Week 2 – Collect data.
Week 3 – Start building the geo-database and integrate the data.
Week 4 – Set up pilot project, by finding event and working with event planners to set up drop off locations and times (for crowd control), as well as coordinate advertising and figure out where most people interested in attending are.
Week 5 – Work on demographics and information given from the event planners to locate people to advertise.
Week 6 – Plan locations for pick-ups to the event and plan for modifying the PTS to accommodate for more people to the event. This includes organizing the PTS to work more to accommodate the new traffic, yet still provide normal services.
Week 7 – Advertise in the areas where we expect to draw people to the event form. And work with event planners in advertising both the event and the new service.
Week 8 – Continue advertising and measure response to attempt to calculate how many people will use the public transportation for this event.
Week 9 – Monitor event and reevaluate what works and doesn’t to improve on system.
Week 10 – Train people to implement this new service and maintain the system.
Theoretical Framework

Work Flow

The scope of this project will be broad and include two departments. The Community Outreach Program Leader under the Department of Parks and Recreation, working closely with the Department of Transportation, will direct it. All three division leads of buses, traffic, and light rail will be involved. Working together we will create a system that can be implemented when needed. The project will require access to a computer lab and hard drive space to hold the database. Research fro the data and some digitizing of new bus stop and pick-ups locations. The precision of the data will not be paramount, though good data makes any project better. Our needs will be use of computer lab and memory storage for the database. The software we will be using is ArcMap, with some minimal licenses. Most importantly are the people. One person will do most of the project; that will be the Community Outreach Program Leader (COPL). The COPL will have a small staff of two to three people to help with the GIS and overall coordinating. The COPL will coordinate with the Department of Transportation and their Leads. It will be the COPL’s responsibility to organize and maintain the schedule. The people in the Department of Transportation will supply support in forms of data needed for the project and organizing the PTS to meet the plans set forth by the system. Advertising is another issue that will be imperative to the success of the system; a budget for advertising and an Ad Consultant will be hired to manage the advertising. The Ad consultant will be supplied with the appropriate area and people’s addresses to advertise to by the Community Outreach Leader. Procedures for data acquisition will the responsibility of the COPL. They will include acquiring the roads, venue locations, demographics, residences addresses, bus routes, other public transportation routes, land use (more specifically parking lots or open fields where buses can pick up people, and people can park their cars or just meet prior and after the event), and traffic congestion data around venues from previous events. Some of the data will be acquired from the transportation department, such as roads, PTS routes, and the traffic congestion data from special events. Demographics can be attained from census data, and target audience and some people’s addresses can be attained through the event organizers, as they will have some idea who will be interested in that event. Procedures of updating and re-executing the system for each special event will come to the COPL to perform, and it will be that person’s responsibility to reorganize the PTS and organize the advertising. After every event the data should be saved as a separate project, and accessible for future special event planning. The data that is relevant to any future project will be added to the database and metadata will be completed to contain all projection and original origin as well as what projects that data was used in. Every special event will be unique and have different target audiences to advertise to. But some aspects of each will repeat; for instance the location of Sun Devil stadium is not going to change, and the general area of people that would take public transportation to the event will not change to much either, so regular Cardinal games should be similar in nature and use similar data. Public transportation should be viewed as a convenience that everyone could use, not just lower income people. Special events draw many different people, yet the hassles of getting to them and the traffic around them are a burden on the spectators. The use of the PTS for these events and the advertising of it may induce many more people to use the public transportation, which would help alleviate the stress on the existing transportation infrastructure. During special events traffic is a concern, with more public transportation, and preference given to it, traffic may be reduced. Another problem the special events have is crowd control. Tempe is a college town and the recent eruption of riots after games and other special events by college students calls to attention the need of crowd control. With many of the people coming to the event on the PTS, and being dropped off and after picked up at the same location to return home that portion of the crowd can be managed better and moved into the venue and away from the venue quicker, allowing for less time to mobs to form and riots to begin. The implementation of this system efficiently and at high enough capacity, may also reduce the cost to the city by alleviating the need for police presence and more effectively controlling the traffic and crowd. Training for the COPL staff will consist of a one-week course to get acquainted to the hard ware and software available for the project. During this week the staff will also be getting familiar with the Department of Transportation’s people and data, along with one organizer for a special event intended for the pilot project. Once the pilot project is completed, and a workable system is in place the template for future events will be easily transferred to other cities, and in broader terms to the greater Phoenix area. The data needed and the ArcMap software in conjunction with the PTS of any city this plan and system could be implemented for any event. The City of Tempe should expect from this system a template for promoting public transportation at the same time as promoting special events while also organizing and controlling the traffic and crowd better than before around the special events.

Deliverables

Every event will be a new project, but as experience is gained and each project is compiled and added to the database, the time spent researching for advertising and rerouting PTS will be reduced. The Capturing of data from each event will be saved as a project in ArcMap, and be accessible for future projects to gather data in the form of layers. This will need to be stored and backed up on several hard drives. The projects will be displayed to communicate what routes will be needed come into consensuses with the other parties involved. Then once the consensus has been agreed upon, the plan for the routing of public transportation maps will be produced for the advertising campaign and maps for the bus drivers. The time expected for a project would be ten weeks or two and a half months. The training and preparing will occur in the first week. The data collection and database organization will occur in the next two weeks. Coordinating with the event planner about target audience and drop off locations for crowd control will take place on week 4, 6 weeks before the event. Then on week 5 we contact an Ad agency and work out our target audience and where they are and how best to reach them. Week 6 is spent working out the pick-up locations and PTS routing. On week 7 we begin our ad campaign with the produced maps and PTS routes. Week 8 we continue advertising and start to get feed back as to how much volume the PTS will experience, and adjust the planned intervals for busses and possible light rail to the event. Week 9 is the event and we monitor it and continue our ad campaign until the day of the event. During the event we monitor and take note of what worked best and what needs improvement. The week after the event is taken to compile the data into the Database and compile the Metadata of what problems need to be looked at for next project. Our metadata will follow ESRI’s use of FGDC Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata plus added notes about each project and what happen in the implementation and what suggestions for another similar project.

Liability Statement

The Community Outreach Program Leader and/or their staff will not be responsible for any representation of the special event or will they responsible for what people that take the public transportation do before, during, or after the event. The attendance of people to the event is not the responsibility of anyone working for this project.

Budget

Item Cost Reason

Salaries… $170,000 we need a high quality team
Advertising… $70,000 the project depends highly on informing the public
Hardware/software $0 Their should be computers using ArcMap accessible

Conclusion The implementation of a Public Transportation System for special events coupled with advertising for it will increase the use of the PTS and help the community. It will be a great marketing tool for the public transit and fulfill the job description for Community Outreach Program leader to further the use of public transit and at the same time provide a safer service fro the community.
Bottom of Form
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Organize Group

Special Event

Get Data

Coordinate with Department of Transportation

Map of reorganized PTS Routes

Advertise

Implement

Evaluate

Sun Devil Stadium

Public Transit Routes

Drop Off and Pick Up Spot

Pick up and Drop off Spots