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UTC endorses Connections 2025
Thursday, October 13, 2016 by Caleb Pritchard
The Urban Transportation Commission has given its support to Connections 2025, the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s unfinished service plan rewrite. On Tuesday night, the commission unanimously voted to recommend that City Council get behind the plan once the transit agency’s board of directors approves it later this year. The stated goal of Connections 2025 is to focus “on creating a fast, frequent, simplified and more connected system.” The proposed changes also include expanded suburban service. However, with no final version of Connections 2025 yet at hand, Commissioner Cynthia Weatherby was confused. “Are you asking us for recommendation of the conceptual plan of decreasing headways and the types of service that will be implemented?” she queried agency planner Louis Alcorn. He affirmed that and explained that, once adopted, Connections 2025 will simply be a road map of principles to guide the agency’s next steps for the next decade. He added that none of the current proposed changes are set in stone. “For each change that we implement, we’ll go through the same type of process that we currently do,” he said. “It’s not going to be January of 2017, a flip is switched [sic], and all the sudden all the routes are different. We’ll go through the process for every single route, every single thing we decide to change, in terms of public engagement and our normal service change process.” Capital Metro staff is expected to deliver the final draft of Connections 2025 to the board in November, and final ratification is set for December.
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