TO: AC Transit Board of Directors
FROM: Michael A. Hursh, General Manager/Chief Executive Officer
SUBJECT: Broadway Nighttime Detours
BRIEFING ITEM
AGENDA PLANNING REQUEST: ☒
RECOMMENDED ACTION(S):
Title
Consider receiving a debrief report on the activities that led to the Broadway nighttime service detour and the actions to return the service to normal routing. [Requested by Director Syed - 3/13/24]
Staff Contact:
Ramakrishna Pochiraju, Executive Director of Planning & Engineering
Body
STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE:
Goal - Safe and Secure Operations
Initiative - Service Quality
Providing service along the Broadway corridor during all hours and days of the week is critical given the corridor’s significance to not only the AC Transit service network but also the vitality of Downtown Oakland. Maintaining this service for AC Transit customers and balancing this with the need for safe and secure operations is key to the success of nighttime transit operations along the corridor.
BUDGETARY/FISCAL IMPACT:
There is no budgetary/fiscal impact associated with this Briefing Item.
BACKGROUND/RATIONALE:
Detour Development Process
Like most transit agencies operating in an urban environment with constant development and infrastructure improvements, AC Transit has routes that are regularly detoured to accommodate sidewalk, bus stop, and roadway closures/blockages. Preparation and planning for these detours vary in length and effort depending on the reason for the detour and how well the detour is coordinated between the requester and the District. Service changes resulting from detours fall into two categories:
• Short-term detours that are developed in the field and not changed in the scheduling data. These are typically less than three months long and would end before staff is developing the service changes for the next Sign-up. Short-term detours are managed by the District’s Road Supervision team and addressed as quickly as possible. Major short-term detours such as bus stop and road closures for parades, short term road work, and marathons include a more formal communications process that involves the Marketing & Communications team. Detours are entered by the District’s Operations Control Center into the computer-aided dispatch system, CleverCAD, and communicated to riders via ACT RealTime and GTFS Real Time, with a service notice.
• Long-term detours are also developed in the field and included in scheduling and bus stop data for the next possible Sign-up export. These are longer term detours treated as service changes for the upcoming Sign-up and will be reverted back to normal scheduled service in the data as part of a future sign-up, depending on the duration of the detour. Construction of major developments falls under this category and this effort typically involves the Planning and Scheduling departments in order to update data and coordinate with the detour requestor. Long-term detours are more challenging to implement because the decision to change internal data is made four to six months prior to implementation of a sign up, and detour conditions can change within that time period.
While execution of detours is key to successful implementation and communications to the riding public, the decision to go on detour is straightforward because there are not many options when a bus stop or roadway needs to be closed. As a result, detour development falls into staff’s routine duties for managing the bus service and communicating changes to the riders.
This process was also true at the start of the Broadway nighttime weekend detours when the Oakland Police Department (OPD) closed off a segment of Broadway during the same time period in order to better manage safety and security for Broadway patrons.
Events and Decisions behind the Broadway Detour
Road closures on Broadway that prompted AC Transit to detour its routes off of the corridor date back to August of 2022. At that time, in response to some criminal and disruptive activity, OPD closed off the segment of Broadway between 17th Street and 19th Street to vehicle traffic for a week. Due to continuing adverse activity, in December 2022, the District permanently moved the Owl lineup (connecting point between “All Nighter” service routes) from 20th and Broadway to 14th and Broadway. OPD extended the downtown closures for weeks, which turned into months and ultimately lasted for over a year. Over that period, OPD also expanded closures to include the same two blocks but on Telegraph Avenue. Early in OPD’s decision process, AC Transit requested an exemption for buses to continue to travel through the corridor, but because of the hard barriers blocking the roadway, OPD said this was not possible. This correspondence between staff and an OPD captain occurred in August 2022. Without clearly knowing an exact date for when the closed Broadway segment would reopen, the District’s service on Broadway continued to operate on detour Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, and staff was not able to update the bus stop and schedule data in the various operations and trip-planning systems. Therefore, actual bus routing and stops never matched the customer-facing data throughout this period.
In August of 2023, OPD ran out of overtime funding to maintain the road closure and subsequently reopened Broadway to all traffic. Double-parked vehicles and sideshow activity were still preventing traffic from getting through the corridor, and in communications with staff, OPD Captain Clay Burch sent AC Transit an email on August 7, 2023 advising the closures are ending due to funding. Captain Burch further advised that the previous weekend vehicle and sideshow activity was so high on Broadway that AC Transit may want to consider rerouting on weekend nights at least until the summer ends.
AC Transit complied and continued to operate on detour without a defined end date. By this time, the service detour had expanded to Sunday nights from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m OPD extended Broadway closures until October 2023 and once the roadway opened, AC Transit resumed service on Broadway for a short period of time. During that period, buses could not regularly travel through the corridor because of sideshow and other activity, and vehicles blocking bus travel lanes and bus stops. In addition, the Alameda County Sheriffs contracted to AC Transit did not have the resources to have additional presence on Broadway to assist with transit operations without leaving a void in coverage elsewhere in the service area. Road supervision and operators voiced concerns regarding persistent criminal and unsafe activity. As a result, staff made a decision to continue with the detours on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Weekend service on Broadway did not return to regular routing until March 2024.
Matching Operations and Customer-facing data bases and service information with the Detour
As previously stated, the uncertainty of the duration of OPD’s Broadway street closure, and the subsequent sideshows and other illegal roadway activity after Broadway was reopened, led staff to a decision to continue operating Broadway service on a detour indefinitely. Based on this decision, staff also decided in November 2023 to finally align the bus stop and schedule data with the detour operations so riders could see accurate schedule information in RealTime systems for the March 2024 Sign-up
The detour in place at the time of making this decision spanned Friday night into Saturday morning, Saturday night into Sunday morning and Sunday night into Monday morning. Staff develops schedule and bus stop data under three service day types: Weekday, Saturday, and Sunday. In order for the detour and scheduling data to align with consistent and correct data, staff entered the stop and schedule changes for the detour into our systems for all three service day types. This resulted in the detour being in effect for seven nights per week instead of the three nights per week as planned by the District’s Operations team.
In addition, the decision to match the data with actual operations was made four months prior to implementation of the data change. In that time, conditions on Broadway may have changed and the impacts to transit operations along the corridor seemed less severe. However, given that the District’s comprehensive and thorough workflow process to develop and implement service changes in our systems takes months to complete, staff would not have had the ability to undo the changes before the March 2024 implementation.
As a result, in the weeks leading up to the scheduled service change on March 3rd, 2024, the District released public information reflecting a seven-night-per-week detour off of the segment of Broadway identified above.
Actions to turn off the Broadway Detours
Once staff heard concerns from riders, advocates and elected officials over the released public information on the upcoming Broadway detour service change in March of this year, staff immediately corrected the information and reversed course to ensure that the detour was only in effect for three nights per week instead of seven. Shortly afterward, and after consultation with OPD and other stakeholders, staff made the decision to completely remove the Broadway nighttime detours and fully re-open the bus stops along the segment of the corridor noted above by March 8, 2024. To implement this change, staff conducted the following activities:
• Communicated the change through the District’s digital messaging channels.
• Updated at-stop signage with added decals and schedule information on Broadway.
• Entered manual daily data adjustments in the District’s Computer Aided Dispatch/Automatic Vehicle Locator (CAD/AVL) system to improve accuracy of the real-time information system.
• Informed our bus operators and staff of the change through our internal communications channels.
• Issued a press release detailing the service, which was picked up by a number of news media outlets.
• Shared all relevant communications with key stakeholders such as elected officials and Community-based Organizations (CBOs)
The final critical path action item was to permanently update the schedule and bus stop data in our database systems to ensure accuracy and full-functionality of our CAD/AVL and real-time information systems. This entails:
• Building correct schedules in the Hastus Scheduling software
• Exporting the full network data package from Hastus to our public information and CAD/AVL database systems
• Processing the data for public information and operational purposes
• Uploading new data package to the District’s bus fleet
Staff completed these steps and fully updated the District’s systems by April 21, 2024. This process typically takes three months to complete and staff, with assistance from Clever Devices was able to complete the process in six weeks.
Missteps in the Decision-making Process
After thoroughly reviewing the actions which led to the implementation of the Broadway detours, staff has identified the following errors in our processes and decision-making that we intend to correct when planning similar detours in the future:
• While there was significant criminal and safety incidents that led staff to decide to continue with the Broadway detour after OPD reopened the street, they were occurring less regularly and were less disruptive. Staff should have monitored the corridor more closely and returned nighttime service back to Broadway sooner despite OPD’s recommendation to stay on detour.
• Decisions to go on detour were made in an abundance of caution for the safety of our operators, road supervisors, and riders which resulted in unintended impacts. Staff reviewed our customer inquiry database and of 3,645 complaints on routes that travel along Broadway since August 2022. Of those comments, 47 (or 1.3%) were related to Broadway detours. Therefore, this item did not draw the attention of staff from a customer complaint perspective. However, staff understands that detours, particularly along this corridor impacted the customer experience of riding AC Transit in Downtown Oakland at night.
• Staff does not have the capability to create a Friday-only or Monday-only schedule variant in Hastus, so the only option was Weekday, Saturday, and Sunday data exports. Staff is exploring the feasibility of this process now and how it would affect bus operator assignments.
The decision to include the Broadway detour into the data was made by lower-level staff and missed by direct managers. As described above, detours are typically seen as routine, binary decisions, but given the magnitude of this detour, the decision should have been made at a much higher level.
The rationale for staff’s decision to include the Broadway detours into the March 2024 Sign-up change was to have our CAD/AVL and customer information systems match actual operations. While this is normally a good principle, keeping the service on Broadway should have been a higher priority.
• Communication of the Broadway detour into the March 2024 service change was not reported to the Board of Directors via the regular service change Staff Report. The report on service changes by Sign-up that goes to the Board quarterly as a Briefing Item (and hence to Executives and the GM) only includes service changes that result in a change in service hours or bus operator count. Routine detour and stop changes that do not have a cost or cost savings have not been a part of this report.
• Because the Broadway detours was formally added to the Hastus schedule data for the March 2024 Sign-up, it was interpreted by downstream systems as a permanent service change, including by the Marketing and Communications Department, which is normal practice since anything in the data is considered permanent until it is undone in a future Sign-up.
• Broadway detours was dropped from the Oakland Inter-agency Liaison Committee agenda (skipped on one agenda and not included in another) primarily because there was nothing to report from OPD once Broadway was reopened. Staff did not continue to report on the service itself.
Planned Improvements to the Detour Development Process Going Forward
The missteps identified above have prompted staff to immediately improve the District’s detour development process and identify specific actions to ensure staff minimizes detours and their impacts on riders where possible. Below is a list of those improvements and actions:
• While individual reports of criminal and safety incidents are important, decisions to detour service for prolonged periods of time due to safety concerns must also be data driven in order to make informed decisions that put the riders needs first.
• Mandated executive review of the proposed service changes for an upcoming Sign-up before they are finalized by staff. Key executives will review and approve the Planning Service Specifications Document that includes all proposed service changes in detail, down to bus stop changes.
• There will be a second executive review and approval of all service changes after the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192 (ATU) Drivers Committee reviews them since additional changes could be proposed by ATU. The Sign-up service changes are final and ready for data export after this second review.
• Staff will include of all service changes in the Sign-up Service Change Staff Report that is presented to the Board for review one to two months prior to implementation. Future reports will provide more details on detours and bus stop changes.
• Public messaging on service changes will be more nuanced to differentiate between changes which are considered permanent and those that are long-term detours.
• Staff is investigating the feasibility of exporting daily schedule variants instead of only Weekday, Saturday and Sunday variants. Initial tests indicate that it is possible to have separate data exports for an individual weekday. If service becomes significantly different on a particular day, it may become necessarily to create a separate set of runs for that day. This has implications on how the service is scheduled and put together into weekly bus operator assignments.
• If feasible, develop a process for Mid-Sign-up Export in order to update scheduling and bus stop data more frequently than every quarter. Part of the consideration for this process is if it should be done regularly or only in urgent situations. If it is the latter, those situations would need to be defined. In addition, there are challenges with adding more Sign-up exports:
o The Clever Devices system can only work in one booking at a time, which is a constraint given our current sign-up development process calendar is very tight.
o Depending on the number of changes, the Mid-Sign-up Export would take six to eight weeks to complete and could require additional staff given the amount of work involved.
o The addition of a Mid-Sign-up Export would, at times, require staff to work on two sign-ups simultaneously which creates timeline and version control issues when working in Hastus.
• Detours will be a regular topic of discussion and coordination at a number of coordination meetings that staff already has with regard to service changes.
ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES:
This debrief report on the Broadway Nighttime Detours provides the Board of Directors and the public with insight into staff’s decision process, missteps and external factors that led to no weekend night service along Broadway between 14th & 20th Street. The report also lays out improvements in the District’s detour development process to ensure that the customer experience is a top priority.
Staff sees no disadvantages to providing this report.
ALTERNATIVES ANALYSIS:
While staff should have considered different alternatives along the way for many aspects of the Broadway Nighttime Detours, there are no alternatives associated with providing this debrief report.
PRIOR RELEVANT BOARD ACTION/POLICIES:
Board Policy #544 - Service Adjustments
ATTACHMENTS:
1. Agenda Planning Request Form
Prepared by:
Robert del Rosario, Director of Service Development & Planning
In Collaboration with:
Dwain Crawley, Director of Transportation
Nichele Laynes, Director of Marketing & Communications
Approved/Reviewed by:
Ramakrishna Pochiraju, Executive Director of Planning & Engineering
Beverly Greene, Executive Director of External Affairs, Marketing & Communications
Salvador Llamas, Chief Operating Officer