The goal of the T-SCORE Center is to move beyond defining the problem of ridership decline and to develop strategies for achieving sustainable and resilient transit into the next decade or more. We will do this by articulating the markets that transit can best serve in a competitive environment and equipping planners with the tools needed to translate this strategic vision into their own regions.
Transit agencies and their partners face many challenges in deciding which of these approaches to pursue and how to do so within their operating environment constraints. The T-SCORE Center will work with industry to define a set of strategic visions and to equip local planners with the tools needed to translate their chosen vision into how to operate services in their own community.
The Center research begins with the strategy generation stage which, based on expert advice, will generate qualitative descriptions of 3-5 strategic visions that transit agencies and their partners can take for further evaluation. These strategic visions will feed into a two-track research assessment that includes a community analysis track and a multi-modal optimization and simulation (MMOS) track. Both of these tracks aim to identify in more detail the potential feasibility, benefits, costs and implications of each strategic vision. These tracks will come together in the final strategic vision evaluation stage, in which the findings are again considered in the context of expert advice. The end result is an assessment of the likely benefits and trade-offs involved with each strategic vision. In this framework, research components will be undertaken in parallel, with defined outputs from each, allowing T-SCORE to complete the work within the 18-month timeframe. The Advisory Committee will inform all stages of the research, with a particularly intense focus on Strategy Generation, Strategy Evaluation, and Tech Transfer components, assuring that the research is relevant and applicable to practitioners. The graphic below summarizes the research overview.
