Fast-Tracked: A Tactical Transit Study (2019)

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10 ONLINE INVESTIGATION The research team received suggestions from the panel for projects to include in the final report. These initial suggestions were supplemented (to the best of the research team’s ability) with online investigation to identify projects that seemed to have created enough impact to have an online presence and that spanned a number of different characteristics, such as: • Infrastructure type (e.g., dedicated lane, boarding platform, signalization adjustments, shared bus–bike lanes, wayfinding), • Project team (e.g., city department of transportation, transit operator, nonprofit, grassroots initiative), • Duration (e.g., demonstration, pilot), and • Geographic location (at least one project per region of the country). The research team used the following search terms to discover projects that had yet to be identified online: “bus tactical urbanism,” “transit pilot project,” “pop-up bus lane,” and “quick build bus project.” Thirty-one projects were represented on the initial interview list; of these, only 20 projects were included in the final report because of inability to connect with the project teams, redundancy in the types of projects featured, or a lack of sufficient available information. The projects included in the final report were those that the research team deemed to have the most value in terms of lessons learned and insight and that comprised the strongest set of projects that characterized the application of Quick-Build methods to surface transit at this time. INTERVIEWS A total of 36 interviews contributed to the final report. The research team found contacts for the projects either through the panel or online investigation and invited these individuals to participate in a 1-hour interview. Through the responses to these invitations, the research team was connected either with additional project team members who could provide valuable insight into the project planning or execution or with the project manager who worked most closely on the project. The research team also added people to the list of those to be interviewed if an interviewee suggested that other project team members could provide additional information or if the research team felt an additional perspective would substantially inform the project’s summaries. Interview follow-ups consisted of requesting items discussed in the conversations, like final reports, images, striping plans, and any other documents that helped deepen the research team’s understanding of the projects. The project teams were also given the opportunity to provide feedback on the project summaries included, all but one of which took advantage of this opportunity. “The reality is that we bypassed a lot of the process. The pilot is the process.” Transportation Planner, City of Everett