Agenda Item Wording:
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Short-Range Transit Plan/Reimagine Study public comments - Receive public comments on the current progress and preliminary recommendations in the development of the Short-Range Transit Plan/Reimagine Study update
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Agenda Date: 09/21/2026
Prepared by:
Angelina Baker, Transit Manager, Angelina.Baker@visalia.gov, (559)713-4591 Caleb Bowman, Management Analyst, Caleb.Bowman@visalia.gov, (559)713-4594 John Lollis, Assistant City Manager, John.Lollis@visalia.gov, (559)713-4323
Department Recommendation:
Staff recommends that the City Council receive public comments on the current progress and preliminary recommendations in the development of the Short-Range Transit Plan/Reimagine Study update, and provide direction as determined.
Summary:
The SRTP is an action plan developed to guide the implementation of transit service improvements over the next five (5) years. A SRTP of the City’s transit routes is important to improve the efficiency of service within the City, address future land use development and transportation investments, and enhance connectivity to regional bus services. The SRTP responds to key issues identified by Visalia Transit customers and others to create a system that will be more attractive to new riders in the years to come. This particular update is especially critical as Transit will use it to “reimagine” the City’s current system.
Ridership has not recovered from the pandemic, and Transit needs to evolve into a new vision that creates efficiencies and improves rider access. In June 2025, Visalia Transit launched the Visalia Connect microtransit pilot program, and as part of this SRTP update the consultant will use the data from the pilot to help rebuild a more efficient Visalia Transit Fixed Route system.
The City of Visalia has changed significantly in recent years. Where people live and work, how and when they travel, and the types of trips they make have all shifted since the pandemic. At the same time, the cost of providing transit has increased, population growth and new development are creating new demands on the system, and Federal and State transit funding has been generally stagnant. These changes make it important to reconsider whether the existing network is still the best way to use Visalia Transit’s limited resources.
Why Make Changes to the Network?
The last comprehensive redesign of the Visalia Transit network was more than a decade ago. While previous SRTP’s have examined individual routes and service needs, this process provides an opportunity to look at the network holistically and reconsider how the network operates as a whole.
Ridership patterns have also changed since the pandemic. Although Visalia Transit has maintained a relatively stable level of service, ridership has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. The best network for the future may therefore look different from the network developed in the past.
The analysis of the existing system identified several important challenges:
1. It takes too long to travel by transit
The current network has many overlapping routes, but most operate too infrequently to provide consistently useful service. Only one route operates every 15 minutes, while others operate every 30, 45, or 60 minutes. Routes meeting at the Visalia Transit Center are also not consistently coordinated, making transfers longer and less predictable.
As a result, similar trips can take very different amounts of time depending on the route and time of day. A simpler network with fewer, more direct routes could allow Visalia Transit to concentrate frequencies on the corridors with the greatest demand.
2. Most residents are far from frequent transit
Only a small share of Visalia residents currently live near frequent service. Much of the city has service, but that service is often infrequent. This means riders must either plan trips around the bus schedule or spend substantial time waiting.
The problem is particularly important for low-income residents and other populations who are more likely to depend on transit. Improving frequency in areas with strong demand could make transit substantially more useful without necessarily expanding the overall amount of service.
3. Demand is concentrated along a few major corridors
Residents and jobs are concentrated along several important corridors, including Mooney Boulevard, Main Street and the Locust/Court/Dinuba corridor. These areas attract ridership throughout Visalia and from surrounding communities, but frequent transit is not consistently available along all of them.
North Visalia in particular has substantial concentrations of residents, jobs, and people with fewer transportation options, yet much of the area is served only every hour or less. This represents an important opportunity to improve transit where there is already strong potential ridership demand.
Regional connections also have opportunities for improvement. Route 11X connects the cities of Visalia and Tulare through State Route 99, however, traffic delays and the need to transfer at the Visalia Transit Center can make trips for Tulare residents to major destinations along Mooney Boulevard unnecessarily long.
4. Microtransit overlaps with fixed-route service
Visalia Connect currently provides microtransit service across most of the city, and approximately 67% of its trips occur within one-half mile of fixed-route service. While door-to-door service is highly convenient, using limited on-demand vehicles to duplicate fixed routes is costly and difficult to scale.
As demand for Visalia Connect grows, additional vehicles and drivers would be needed to maintain short pickup time windows. This would increase operating costs while still providing much less capacity than a fixed-route bus. The opportunity is therefore to make Visalia Connect and fixed-route service complement one another: buses should carry larger numbers of people along major corridors, while on-demand service should fill gaps where fixed routes are less efficient.
5. Bus stops are closely spaced
Visalia Transit stops are relatively close together, with a median spacing of approximately one-quarter mile. Close spacing makes stops easy to reach, but it also causes buses to stop more frequently causing inefficient and unreliable service while lengthening travel time for riders on board. This is particularly important along key corridors such as Mooney Boulevard and Walnut Avenue.
Increasing stop spacing at carefully selected locations could reduce delays and improve travel times while maintaining reasonable walking accessibility to the stop.
6. How can Transit be more useful?
Time is one of the most important factors in whether people use transit. Most people have limited time for travel, so even those who cannot drive may avoid transit if trips take too long.
How many useful destinations people can reach within a reasonable amount of time. The area someone can reach from their home can be thought of as a “wall around their life”. Beyond it are jobs, schools, shopping, services, and other opportunities that are difficult to access.
Good transit network design can expand this area by making more destinations reachable in less time. Measuring access helps show how changes to routes, frequency, speed, and connections can improve people’s mobility and choices, independent of the ridership those improvements may generate.
Transit increases people’s freedom by making more useful destinations reachable without driving. Access depends on:
• The transit network: including frequency, speed, and service span, and
• The city’s layout, which determines how many jobs, services, and other opportunities are near transit. A person’s location ultimately determines which services are close and useful to them.
When thinking about the network, frequency is key to make transit more useful. More frequent service improves access in several important ways, largely by reducing the time people spend waiting:
• Shorter initial waits mean riders can reach a bus more quickly without planning around a schedule.
• Faster transfers make it easier to connect between routes because the next bus arrives sooner.
• Better recovery from delays means a missed or disrupted trip is less costly when another bus will be arriving shortly.
• Finally, frequent service provides greater freedom and spontaneity, allowing riders to travel when they need to rather than organizing their day around the bus schedule.
On the other hand, several characteristics of the city’s layout make transit more useful and efficient:
• Density: Areas with more residents, jobs, activities, and services generate more potential trips and provide a larger market for transit.
• Walkability: Transit only works if individuals can safely and comfortably walk between their homes or destinations and nearby stops.
• Linearity: Direct routes between major destinations are faster to operate, easier to understand, and more useful to riders.
• Proximity: Closely spaced development is more efficient to serve because buses can connect more people and destinations without traveling long distances through areas with little demand.
• Mix of Uses: Corridors with a mix of housing, jobs, shopping, and other activities and services create demand in both directions making transit more useful and productive.
For Visalia, the challenge is that existing resources are spread relatively thin across the city. The result is broad geographic coverage, but limited frequency and relatively long travel times. The Reimagine Study process therefore focuses on how to get more value from the resources already available.
Key Choices and Tradeoffs
Given Visalia Transit does not anticipate a significant increase in operational funds, improving service in one part of the city generally requires reducing service somewhere else. The Draft Plan therefore focuses on four (4) major tradeoffs.
1. Ridership vs. Coverage
Frequent service is most productive in areas with many residents, jobs, and destinations. Coverage service reaches more places but generally operates less frequently.
The proposed approach is not to choose ridership over coverage, but to use each type of service where it works best: frequent fixed routes along major corridors and flexible on-demand service in lower-density areas.
2. Visalia Connect: Targeted vs. Citywide Service
Citywide on-demand service provides maximum flexibility, but its limited vehicle capacity makes it difficult to scale as demand grows. Continuing to add vehicles would increase costs rapidly and would still not provide the capacity of a bus.
The proposed approach is therefore to provide Visalia Connect microtransit in a two-tier approach:
o Priority # 1: Serve areas that are more than one-half mile from effective fixed-route service. Riders could use on-demand service to reach a nearby transit hub or fixed-route corridor and then continue their trip by bus.
o Priority # 2: Offer a premium service to anywhere in the City, when there are vehicles available and not doing priority #1, and at a higher rate.
3. Connections vs. Complexity
Riders generally prefer direct trips, but providing direct service between every possible origin and destination requires many routes and spreads frequency too thinly.
The proposed network would instead organize service around a smaller number of strong corridors, including Mooney Boulevard, Main Street, and the Locust/Court/Dinuba corridor. Some trips would require transfers, but routes would be designed to meet at key locations through timed connections, minimizing transfer waits.
4. Stop Spacing
Wider stop spacing can make buses faster but requires some riders to walk farther. The proposed approach would increase stop spacing on key corridors such as Mooney Boulevard and Walnut Avenue, where faster travel would provide the greatest benefit.
Draft Plan Network
The Draft Plan Network is designed around the same overall level of operating resources currently available. This means the plan does not solve the underlying funding constraint or allow Visalia Transit to add all of the services that could potentially be useful. Instead, it seeks to make the existing investment more efficient and effective.
Existing Network
The Draft Plan Network would concentrate frequent, direct fixed-route service in the City's strongest travel markets. Three (3) major corridors (Mooney, Dinuba, and Tulare) would receive 15-minute service, while most other routes would operate every thirty (30) minutes or better. Routes would be more direct, and schedules would be coordinated at the Visalia Transit Center to create timed connections and make transfers faster and more predictable.
Coverage would be maintained through targeted Visalia Connect zones serving areas that are more than one-half mile from a fixed-route stop. The service would connect residents to nearby fixed routes and major hubs, allowing people in lower-density areas to reach the broader transit network without requiring a fixed route to operate everywhere.
Visalia Connect would use a two-tier approach. Priority service would serve the coverage zones at a proposed reduced fare of $1.75, allowing riders to travel within their zone or connect to nearby fixed-route service and major hubs. A second tier, Citywide Visalia Connect, would provide flexible citywide service only when vehicles are not needed for the priority zones, at a higher fare.
Regional connections would also improve, including a more direct Visalia-Tulare connection along Mooney Boulevard. Through Route 1, this service would be a collaboration with the Tulare County Regional Transit Agency (TCRTA), which would provide half of the service. The proposed route was developed jointly with TCRTA, incorporating their input throughout the network design process. The proposed service also assumes that regional fare integration will be in place by the time of implementation, allowing passengers to transfer between Visalia Transit and TCRTA services without paying an additional fare.
Service would continue seven (7) days a week, with more consistent hours and frequencies and frequent service maintained on the strongest corridors on weekends.
Together, these changes would create a simpler and more connected transit network: faster and more frequent service where many people want to travel, and flexible coverage where fixed-route service is less efficient.
Background:
The Short-Range Transit Plan or SRTP is a governing planning document that is updated every five (5) years as required by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) that guides a transit agency’s operations, service schedules, budgets, and fleet upgrades. Transit is currently in the process of working with its consultant (Jarret Walker & Associates) to develop the update to the Visalia Transit Short-Range Transit Plan. Part of that process is to receive comments and input from the community on any current transit needs and on the draft recommendations.
The Reimagine Study is a collaborative effort to consider how Visalia Transit could strengthen and improve its network within the existing operational budget. The process brings together analysis of the current system, changing travel patterns, stakeholder priorities, and rider experiences to identify a network that can provide more useful service to more residents.
The Draft Plan Network is presented to explain the data and reasoning behind the proposed changes. Based on public comment and direction from the Council, Transit staff and the consultant will refine the network and incorporate recommended changes, to again present the Draft Final Plan to the Council in the November/December 2026 timeframe for direction on the Final Plan. The revised Final Plan and network will then be presented to the Council in the February/March 2027 timeframe for approval and implementation in January 2028.
Fiscal Impact including annual maintenance and operating costs:
It is beneficial timing for the development of the next 5-year SRTP for Visalia Transit, both from a service and fiscal perspective. Operating expenditures are budgeted at approximately $25.3 million in the current 2026-27 Fiscal Year, and projected to increase by two percent (2%) to approximately $26.0 million in the 2027-28 Fiscal Year. The largest operating expense is the contracted maintenance and operations service with RATP Dev, which is currently an estimated $19.8 million and represents approximately eighty percent (80%) of operating expenditures. Since the 2022-2023 Fiscal Year, operational expenses have increased approximately $8.7 million (42%), while revenue has increased only approximately $1.4 million (6%) due to generally stagnant Federal and State transit funding. The State transit grant funding (SB 125) provided by the Tulare County Association of Governments (TCAG) for the Visalia Connect microtransit pilot project will expire at the end of the 2027-2028 Fiscal Year, which if not extended by TCAG would add an approximate $1.5 million in operating expenses. The Council recently authorized the elimination of Fixed Route 17 serving the Visalia Industrial Park due to exceedingly low ridership, which should lead to an approximate $850,000 reduction in operating expenses. Also, the Council and Transit staff have previously expressed its concern in the cost of operating the Sequoia Gateway Shuttle, with an estimated annual operating expense of $500,000 with similar low (and overwhelmingly non-local) ridership.
Prior Council Action: N/A
Alternatives: N/A
Recommended Motion (and Alternative Motions if expected):
recommendation
I move that the Council receive public comment on the current progress and preliminary recommendations on the development of the Short-Range Transit Plan update, and provide direction as determined.
Environmental Assessment Status: N/A
CEQA Review: N/A
Deadline for Action: 09/21/2026
Attachments:
1. Current Network Map
2. Concept Network Map