A new schedule will begin on January 6th, 2020 and this gives us an opportunity to update some routes to address reported issues and make the system perform better overall.
Route 6 - Clear Lake / Junction Circle
Now that the Ash Street underpass is open, Route 6 will resume using Ash Street instead of detouring around it via Iles/Oberlin. Some slight changes to the time checks on the inbound portion of the schedule were also made to account for the difference in travel time.
Route 7 - West Washington
Route 7 travels to and from the west side of Springfield and downtown, providing connections both at the downtown transfer center and at White Oaks Mall. These connections must be reliable for them to be useful and the current version of the route is not as reliable as it could be. For comparison, here is a graph of the average on-time performance of Route 7 versus that of Route 3.
Daily On-Time Performance Averages
Though Route 7 sometimes reaches as high as the low to mid-90’s on some days, it’s much more variable - and thus less reliable - than other routes such as the 3. And since the 7 connects to other routes downtown and at the mall, this can create on-time issues that cascade through the rest of the system.
To remedy this, we will be removing a total of 19 stops on Route 7 that have been identified as having low ridership or as being close enough to another stop to warrant consolidation. This brings the average stop spacing of the route from 920 feet to 1,163 feet and allows the bus to reach higher speeds.
The map below shows the stops we will be removing in black, with the remaining stops in blue. Click here to open the map in a new tab/window.
There will also be some slight adjustments to the inbound time checks to ensure the bus does not waste any time getting downtown.
Route 902 - Southeast Side Night Service
The newly-opened Ash Street underpass will also allow the 902 to resume using Ash from 6th Street to MLK Drive inbound. No changes will be made to the timetable.
See a one-sheet flyer here.
