California’s Santa Clara County includes San Jose and much of the area commonly known as Silicon Valley.  In 2015, Jarrett Walker + Associates began work on Santa Clara VTA’s Transit Ridership Improvement Program (TRIP), a planning effort intended to develop strategies to make the region’s transit system an even more vital travel option.  The project was completed in 2017 and the new countywide design took effect at the end of 2019.  The new network was successfully implemented in December of 2019, and showed promising ridership results before the Covid-19 pandemic began three months later.  Weekday productivity (passenger boardings / quantity of service) rose 4% in the first 9 weeks after implementation, compared to the same period the previous year.

The three year planning process included presenting alternatives to the public to elicit feedback, which helped to guide the design of the final plan.

For more on this project, including key project maps, see here.

Image: “Silicon Valley”, flickr: Vadim Kurland, link. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 2.0