Streamlining Service

In the early 1990’s, AC Transit shifted gears to implement a system-wide Comprehensive Service Plan (CSP) –an ambitious project to streamline and modernize bus service throughout the East Bay, and to improve coordination with AC’s own service network as well as with connecting transit systems.

The challenge was to design a network that goes where most people want to go today, and to make transferring between routes simple and easy to understand. To meet those goals, the District was aided by an enthusiastic public which contributed much time and energy participation in hearings and workshops, meeting with Directors and planning staff to hammer out details of the CSP improvements.

After the initial phase was introduced in Western Contra Costa County, later stages brought extensive route and schedule improvements to much of the central East Bay. In the urban core – Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda – the decades-old pattern of routes radiating from “downtown” was replaced by a new network of interlacing east-west and north-south routes to greatly facilitate travel.

Today, AC Transit’s 2,000 workers operate a fleet of 700 buses to serve some 230,000 weekday passengers. More than 90% of these riders use local East Bay bus service, while fewer than one in ten travel transbay to and from San Francisco. Riders report that, most often, they use buses to commute between home and the work place. Within the metropolitan East Bay, buses handle 78% of all transit commute trips.

Thus as there year 2,000 approaches, AC Transit continues its century-old tradition of working to meet the East Bay’s critical transportation needs. Oakland and its surrounding communities now boast a relatively healthy economy, a wealth of educational, commercial, industrial, residential and recreational resources-and an efficient mass transportation network tying it all together.

Having successfully survived the funding challenges of the early 1990’s, AC Transit continues to fine-tune the CSP route network improvements already in place and to introduce new streamlined service patterns in the Hayward and Fremont/Newark areas of Southern Alameda County. Thus, AC Transit is able to maintain its effective network of commute-hour bus service that blankets the East Bay.