Des Moines: Welcome to Your New Transit Network

Downtown Des Moines viewed from the Robert D Ray Asian garden, which celebrates the contributions of Asian immigrant groups to the region. Iowa’s capital and largest city, a place I knew well in my childhood, now has a new bus network, the result of our firm’s network design work with the Des Moines Area Regional Transit authority (DART). The new network started operating yesterday so today is its first weekday. The DART network was obsolete because it: Was too focused on suburban Park-and-Ride markets that no longer exist due to working from home. Did not provide adequate frequencies in the densest corridors where there is strong all day demand. Did not make timed connections between routes at the downtown transit center. Here’s what the old network looked like (click to enlarge and sharpen). Note the colors in the legend. Only one segment had service better than every 15 minutes, the point at which transit becomes much more useful and ridership tends to rise more substantially. The…