[Gray] We live in a society that requires mobility.
It requires us to go places to actually live your life.
Most people that ride the bus in a city like Greensboro
plan their entire life around their access to a bus system.
From a lens of equity our primary goal is
to help people have access to things that they need.
[Vonda] It's crucial to have accurate data
to see the inequities of access to transportation.
We looked at population, commute times.
We analyzed food and job availability
and access to health and wellness.
[Gray] We're looking at the way that our roads are designed
but beyond that we're looking at people.
(car engine roaring)
In Greensboro, if you drive your car,
it typically takes 10 to 15 minutes to get across the city.
Whereas it takes an average
of nearly an hour to ride public transportation.
[Vonda] When the Office of Equity and Inclusion decided
to start working with the Department of Transportation,
we found that all of our people of color,
people that have inequities, are in one part of the city
and that's in East Greensboro.
They always had to go downtown first,
transfer to another bus
and go wherever they're planning to go.
[Gray] Remix enables transit planners and transit agencies
to draw ideas on a map about the transit system
and show the instant impacts of changing the route.
I can import a whole bus system.
We'd ask the community like, where is their biggest gap?
So up here in North Greensboro there's no service
for a couple miles between routes
so we can demo adding a new transit line
and then when you turn this new route on
3,600 people gain access to the system
and about 4,000 more jobs along this line.
That's amazing.
Also we're using a tool that Remix has.
Jane helps showcase the travel time of a transit rider.
And so we could place Jane on the downtown depot
and it showed the amount of access she gained
by changing the routes.
[Vonda] It's vital to provide access
to public transportation to all citizens of Greensboro.
The way Remix allowed us to collaborate
across departments made our job a whole lot easier.
[Gray] We were able to do public meetings
and communicate effectively to the community
and to decision-makers to gain buy-in for these changes.
We've officially implemented the changes to the system.
We saw a pretty significant increase
in access across the city.
We saw an increase of ridership and reduction in travel time
it took people to get to major destinations
and we heard praise from the community about direct access
to places that hadn't had direct access to.
Remix really helps mid and small-sized cities
because we don't necessarily always have the same resources
that a big city would have but it definitely is applicable
to wherever you are in the world.
[Natalie] King County is the most populated county
in Washington state.
We do have a pretty good sense of where areas
of congestion are on our service
but we have a really hard time knowing
where people are not able to access
because our transit system doesn't get them there.
So Remix helped us evaluate
whether we might have unintended outcomes
by changing something in the system
that would compromise our ability
to build a more equitable system.
[Yan] Our bus network transports around 125,000 people a day.
Remix was the perfect tool to bring the population
from the local areas to the city centers
due to the redesigned bus networks
that'd be much more efficient in the future.
(gentle music)
[Vonda] Now, it's more of a personal self gratification to know
that I am assisting with changing the way Greensboro works
with racial equity to make things more inclusive
for not just myself but for my children
and my children's children.
[Gray] So we have a whole lot of work cut out for us
because the sooner people have better access
to physical mobility the sooner they have a better quality
of life in Greensboro.
(soft music)
[Host] Thanks for watching.
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