El Paso County Regional Transit: Evaluation, Implementation & Adaptation

The session outlines the process undertaken by El Paso County to evaluate how service levels could be increased for residents served by the County's Rural Transit District, including cost-share models with municipal partners, as well as coordinating with the local metropolitan transit authority.

In 2016, El Paso County sought to understand the process to implement a seamless regional transit experience for users and residents within the County’s rural transit district. After securing funding at the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the County contracted the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) to develop a feasibility study that outlined a variety of topics related to increasing access to transit services in the rural and urban areas outside of the City of El Paso. TTI provided technical assistance and planning support to the County in conducting the study, which builds upon previous planning in the region, including The Far West Texas/El Paso Regional Human Services-Public Transportation Coordination Plan, Plan El Paso, the 2014 Livability Summit (facilitated by TTI), and the 2015 El Paso Multimodal Plan. Each of these plans and initiatives included recommendations to improve and expand transit in the region. 

As previously stated, the County’s transit service focuses on providing residents outside the city limits of the City of El Paso with connectivity to their agency’s transfer center. More specifically, the service area includes Anthony, Canutillo, and Vinton in the northwest; Homestead Meadows North and Homestead Meadows South in the east; and Clint, Fabens, Horizon City, San Elizario, Socorro, and Tornillo in southeast El Paso County. Given the ongoing partnership with the City of El Paso’s Sun Metro, the local metropolitan transit authority, the County also wanted to understand and evaluate how to enhance and expand the existing partnership to achieve efficient and effective delivery of services for residents across the entire community.

The feasibility study was a huge milestone and major steppingstone that provided significant insight into several critical areas. Using this information, the County was able to successfully establish a regional and collaborative governance structure, in partnership with various regional municipalities from the community, to oversee and implement historic and transformative expansion of public transit throughout the El Paso community. The El Paso Area Transportation Services, Local Government Corporation (LGC) was created in 2021 and after completing a series of administrative tasks, is now set to help make service expansion options a reality for thousands of residents across the community. Part of these efforts include transitioning the existing system to a fixed-stop system, providing bus stops and shelters to residents instead of making them wait for the bus on unimproved shoulder road conditions, as well as introducing the required paratransit service to meet ADA requirements. These improvements will be governed and managed by the LGC while also engaging in cost-sharing opportunities with partner municipalities. The work undertaken thus far, and what remains on the horizon, aim to provide all residents within the County an opportunity to access and utilize a reliable and resilient public transit system for years to come.

The session will evaluate and describe the deliberate process undertaken by the County and its consultant, TTI, to understand the various facets related to expanding regional transit for the community. A large part of this effort was related to understanding the needs of the citizenry and actual users of the transit system. In addition to standard community engagement meetings throughout the District’s service area, TTI also completed a survey of ridership for several urban and rural transit districts in Texas, including the County’s system. Surveyors, and intern volunteers from the County, rode each of the County’s transit routes throughout various parts of the day, asking riders to complete a self-administered survey. There were some very significant findings identified by the survey, including: 1) 63 percent of El Paso County Transit’s bus riders do not have a driver’s license, 2) 48 percent of riders reported an annual household income of less than $15,000, and 3) 29 percent of riders do not have a working vehicle available to the household. These findings indicate that investment in public transit is not only vital to provide for the public health, safety and welfare of the community, but also critical to provide foundational services related to economic and workforce development. By offering low-cost mobility options, transit providers offer workers without transportation the ability to access employment markets. Simply put, transit allows residents additional options to get to work, which has the potential to increase employment economy-wide and increase overall economic output. An analysis that studied these impacts found that the economy saw growth with the increase in mobility efficiency.

Panelists on the panel will then discuss the methodology aimed at developing where service expansion was most needed, and what the options were. This was accomplished by the development of two specific measures—the County Transit Need Index (TNI) and a transit supply index (TSI). The TNI is based on demographic statistics at the census block group level to identify concentrations of transit need, while the TSI is based on three specific measures - service coverage, service frequency, and hours of service. TTI then identified where transit service gaps exist and where the need exceeded the service available, which were heavily concentrated in outlying rural areas. Using this information, TTI began to develop various scenarios to help close the service gaps identified directly by the report. The development of various scenarios allowed the County and partner agencies to evaluate which level of service they wanted to provide residents in their service area—it provided the opportunity for incremental changes to be made to the transit system while preserving the opportunity for significant future expansion.

After delays related to the ongoing pandemic, the County and regional partners successfully launched and legally organized the LGC. Since that time, the LGC has procured the administrative, professional, and legal services needed to continue its charge of facilitating service expansion. Additionally, the regional body was able to secure start-up operating assistance funding from the El Paso MPO for provision of new routes and services—many of which have been implemented immediately with other, larger initiatives on the cusp of deployment. Throughout this implementation phase, the LGC Board and County transit staff have worked to further refine the service lines and expansion projects to ensure existing partnerships with transit providers in the region, including Sun Metro. By strengthening the partnership with Sun Metro, the LGC can enhance connectivity between both service providers as well as take incremental steps toward seeing one single transit entity for the entire region. As the largest urban area in the State without a regional transit provider, it is imperative that all transit agencies work toward the goal or providing a seamless transit experience for the public. 

LGC’s are not new to Texas. In fact, they are a common tool utilized by units of local government to help provide any number of services within that respective government's wheelhouse. However, there are very limited instances of LGC’s being used to deploy transit service across the state. At the time the county and its partners were evaluating how to structure the expansion of transit in the community, there was only one other example of an LGC being used in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. However, that model was actually created by the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority to specifically provide service to one individual community—a way for DART to minimize risk if the partnership with that individual community didn’t work out. The El Paso Area Transportation Services, LGC is the first example in the state of partner agencies coming together to provide transit service across an entire region. This model is important because it provides insight as to how different units of local government can partner to provide services, expand existing services with larger partner agencies, and work together to cost share for the efficient and effective provision of any government service, especially as it relates to advancing any number of planning issues in public health, safety, general welfare, or transportation.