Case Study:

Orange County, California

Conclusions

Strengths

OCTA has realized three kinds of benefits from the use of GIS in transit planning: better communication of technical information, more efficient development and maintenance of data sources, and more comprehensive analyses of transit planning questions. To help improve communications between planners and decision-makers on technical matters, OCTA has used GIS to transform information from tabular formats into visual displays. This application is particularly effective because so much of the information - about transit routes, bus stops, and demographic distributions - is naturally tied to specific locations.

To enhance the efficiency of data-related tasks, OCTA has used GIS as a way to organize and connect geographically the data sources maintained by different departments in the agency. Because this connection means that each data source is immediately available to all departments - not just the department that develops and maintains it - each department no longer has to duplicate efforts the efforts of others to maintain and update copies of potentially useful data sources.

Finally, to improve analytical capabilities, OCTA has used GIS and its data-integration tools to expand the breadth and depth of work to answer real-world planning questions. These analyses have previously been either not possible or very cumbersome without the ready capability of GIS to tie together different information based on geographic relationships. As a result, OCTA is now able to uncover and communicate insights from the data that previously have been difficult to detect without GIS.

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