Louisville, Kentucky is the largest city in Kentucky and one of the faster growing regions in the state for the last decade. On the border between North and South and on the Falls of the Ohio, Louisville has long been a crossroads of the country and a major transportation hub. Today it is the home of a major UPS hub and has a burgeoning tourist industry focused on the local spirit: bourbon. Since 1974, Jefferson County (now merged into Metro Louisville city) has had a dedicated funding source for transit, to support the regional agency: Transit Authority of River City (TARC).

Unlike other communities that have sprawled significantly, Louisville maintains a busy and dense downtown with its main community college campus and two major medical centers in the larger downtown area. Yet, while the region has grown significantly in the last 30 years, it has grown more horizontally than vertically in that time. This has created a long-term challenge for TARC: its service area has grown horizontally faster than its financial capacity has grown. This long-term trend led TARC into a challenging situation even before the pandemic. Its operating costs were exceeding its operating revenues, so it had a structural operating deficit for a decade before the pandemic. During the pandemic, federal funding helped TARC fill the structure deficit and mostly maintain its network. Now, like many agencies, TARC is approaching a “fiscal cliff” as Covid relief funds run out, operating costs go up due to the difficulty of hiring workers, and pre-pandemic fare revenue aren’t returning.

Without additional revenue, TARC is facing the possibility of cutting service levels by 50% relative to the Spring 2024 Network. TARC has already started cutting service, dropping back its weekday service to Saturday schedule of service on many routes as of June 30. But these cuts are modest compared to what’s coming if new funding can’t be found.

Our firm is helping TARC and its partners around the region consider how the transit network can change under these circumstances. TARC doesn’t want to shrink, and we certainly don’t envy their situation, but TARC has no authority to raise revenue on its own. So, the best that we and TARC can do is to clearly show what’s possible and ask the community and its leaders to tell us what they prefer.

To clarify what’s possible we have drawn three concepts to show what a future TARC network would look like. Two of those concepts are constrained to the projected revenues and require a 50% cut in service. The third, the Growth Concept, shows what could be achieved with a redesigned network and additional investment that allows TARC to grow service by 12%.

Ridership and Coverage Concepts if There Are No New Revenues

If TARC does not receive additional funding, it will have to cut service 50%.  This will require a difficult tradeoff between competing goals of ridership and coverage.  To illustrate this, we’ve provided two network concepts:

• The Ridership Concept focuses on providing frequent service on the areas that are more likely to use transit – where there are more people and more jobs. It keeps service focused on frequent corridors in the densest, busiest parts of Louisville, but also covers a much smaller area than today’s network. By keeping 15-minute and 30-minute service near most existing riders, this network would maintain reasonable access for most users of the existing system, and therefore maintain ridership to the maximum extent.  However, some existing riders are in the low-ridership area, and they would have no service.
• The Coverage Concept focuses on maintaining the existing amount of coverage and provides some level of transit service – although at greatly reduced levels – to most of the area. Nearly all routes in the network would be hourly or worse in this network, so far fewer people would find service useful. Therefore, many existing riders would likely try to find alternatives, and few people would choose to ride this network.

As always, these are two ends of a spectrum, and not an either-or choice.

When looking at the maps, be sure to notice the colors, which indicate all-day frequency.  Red means service every 15 minutes all day.  The frequency colors are explained in the legend.

Here is a map of the Spring 2024 network (the one we are treating as existing for the purpose of our analysis) and maps of the two constrained Concepts.