Between 2000 and 2010, Austin's population grew from around 656,000 to around 790,000. This growth mainly occurred on the periphery of the city, with central Austin's population remaining fairly stable, with a few exceptions. Meanwhile, bus ridership was flat during that period.

With Austin growing and transitioning into a good-sized metropolitan area, it is important to re-evaluate our transportation needs and, specifically, to encourage transit use. City council has recently passed a climate action plan, and transportation is a significant source of CO2 emissions. Aside from that, there is a limit to the number of cars that a street can move within a given period of time. Once this limit is reached, mass transit becomes essential as a mobility tool not only to meet the needs of people who cannot or prefer not to own a car but also to enable efficient movement of large numbers of people. Note that encouraging modeshift does not mean attempting to force people out of their cars but, rather, designing our city in a way that facilitates alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles.

Jarrett Walker has a post where he discusses factors that determine transit ridership. For instance, a transit line will be successful if it travels along a route where lots of people live and where there are destinations that lots of people want to get to. In addition, service should be frequent--if a bus comes, say, every half-hour, and a person misses their bus by a minute, then they will need to wait for around 29 minutes before the next bus arrives. Similarly, trips that require a transfer can mean waiting for up to a half-hour for the second bus to arrive. Thus, more frequent service means less waiting and reduces the need to plan one's time around the bus schedule, mitigating a factor that often makes travel by car seem advantageous to travel by bus.

Capital Metro recently completed a service plan that emphasizes frequency, creating several routes that will provide service at least every 15 minutes during the day. This has the potential to improve service and thus boost ridership, but much depends on the number of people living within easy walking distance of the frequent bus routes and on the avaailability of destinations on these routes. These, in turn, are affected by our land use code.

It is advantageous to locate housing and businesses in ways that they are easily served by transit. This increases the likelihood that people will utilize transit in preference to driving a car. Thus, ridership increases, which creates justification for transit improvements, which, in turn, will further increase ridership, creating a virtuous cycle. For instance, multi-family housing within easy walking distance of frequent bus service will result in more potential riders than detached single-family homes will. Minimum parking regulations in areas well-served by transit work against transit ridership in two ways, to the extent that they add parking that would otherwise be used for some other purpose. They create opportunity costs, limiting the amount of housing that can be built or the number of businesses that can locate within a given area, decreasing the number of destinations that are easily accessible by walking or by transit. Additionally, they subsidize and incentivize travel by car. If driving and taking transit are close to being equally convenient for a particular trip and parking is easily available at the destination, then people are more likely to choose to drive.