Nashville's transit system going through major transformation even after referendum failure | Opinion

• Zak Accuardi is a freelance transit consultant and recent Nashville transplant.

Since voters’ unambiguous rejection of the Let’s Move Nashville plan in May, WeGo has quietly pursued an impressive slate of projects, from a system-wide rebranding to ongoing Central Station renovations.

The most ambitious among those projects, however, is just starting to come into view.

In recent months, both Mayor Briley and WeGo CEO Steve Bland have started referencing WeGo’s most important change in years, one with transformative potential for Metro bus riders: a redesign (or “streamlining”) of Nashville’s entire existing bus network, which carried 94 percent of Nashville’s transit riders in 2017.

In the wake of the referendum defeat bus riders, Nashvillians, and WeGo Transit itself need this project to succeed.

A modernized bus network — one with higher frequencies, more consistent service on the weekend, and routes that better connect people to the places they want to go today — would improve service in the near-term while helping to make a stronger case for future transit improvements.

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Redesigns of transit systems do not come easy

Transportation advocates and bus riders are already calling for more of these service quality improvements, which are also prioritized in the Mayor’s Moving the Music City transportation action agenda.

This redesign also presents an opportunity to have a renewed and transparent public conversation about Nashville’s vision for transit — a vision that can replace Let’s Move Nashville, and one that the community can feel invested in.

Redesigns do not come easily. Indeed, while any successful redesign will benefit many more people than it inconveniences, redesigns require hard trade-offs that often lead to service being cut or scaled back at specific stops or even to the elimination of entire routes.

These trade-offs carry significant implications for people who have organized their lives around their bus stops, and the trade-offs are harder to manage smoothly in the absence of new funding.

Past experience in Greensboro, North Carolina serves as a cautionary tale. In the early 2010s, the Greensboro Transit Authority’s board pursued a network redesign, hired a consultant, and unveiled their plan to the public only to table it when the public cried foul, feeling that the plan had been ‘forced’ upon them without their input.

Public buy-in is essential for success

WeGo is at risk of repeating Greensboro’s mistake.

According to its own board meeting minutes, the agency is already more than a year into its “Better Bus” planning efforts.

Yet outside of boardrooms and invite-only presentations, bus riders — the redesign’s most important stakeholders — have heard little if anything about these plans.

WeGo is capable of award-winning public outreach, as they proved in the development of their current strategic plan, nMotion, but their community conversations cannot stop there if agency and Metro leadership are committed to expanding the transit system.

A new round of outreach is necessary to earn public buy-in through proactive, transparent public conversations that can genuinely shape the trajectory of this essential project.

Metro Nashville may not be investing more than $5 billion in new public transit infrastructure starting in 2019, but that does not mean that WeGo can afford to delay any further in rebuilding its most valuable infrastructure, public trust.

Zak Accuardi is a freelance transit and sustainability consultant and recent Nashville transplant. For three years, he worked at TransitCenter, a leading national voice on public transit policy and advocacy.