How GIS Is Powering LA Metro’s Vision 2028

Government innovation typically focuses on agencies and how better internal processes can reshape their missions. These supply-side innovations concentrate on legacy structures and administrative requirements. This approach tends to produce services that are incrementally better but often poorly aligned with how people live, move, and make decisions.   

LA Metro’s Moving People Forward strategy focuses on demand, placing the traveling public at the center of decision-making. This user-centered design starts with understanding human behavior, needs, motivations, and context. The agency’s transportation demand management (TDM) program examines everything from pricing to mobile app usability to the physical and psychological barriers residents experience in accessing transportation, including safety and the design and attractiveness of LA Metro’s new Mobility hub concepts.

Locational Intelligence and Geospatial Data

This demand approach helps Metro with large-scale planning, such as preparing for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics under the agency’s Vision 2028 Strategic Plan and supports bottom-up changes that improve the user experience. Aaron J. Voorhees, LA Metro manager, Transportation Planning, explains, “If I can get you on the train and you have a positive experience, it doesn’t mean you’re going to take the train every day. But now you understand that it’s a useful tool for getting around and seeing this vast area more easily.”  This attention to residents' needs led Voorhees to a transformative insight; “in Southern California, we have so many resources that we can use to create a supplemental grid to keep these services moving and in sync with buses, rail, and freeways, giving people the ability to choose different types of transportation.

A GIS foundation helps the agency expand the sources and uses of information. By understanding place-based mobility—how people reach stops, where they travel, and the barriers they face, Metro can enhance first‑ and last-mile connections, adjust service frequencies, and balance priorities. Metro uses its GIS capabilities to assist planners in analyzing origin-destination data, ridership patterns, and other factors to optimize routes and frequencies. This approach has doubled the number of high-frequency bus routes and expanded evening and weekend service. Metro’s GIS capabilities help planners understand demographic patterns, land use, and the geography around bus stops, leading to insights into how and why people choose transit at specific locations. 

Ultimately, for a demand-based system, GIS provides more than data; it gives context. Services can be adjusted to reflect actual patterns, including local, short, and frequent trips, where people are more likely to adopt alternatives to a car, such as walking or biking. Government-centric design often fails to achieve this because it optimizes the system rather than the experience. The difference can be seen in the method Metro used to evaluate demand at the bus stop level, which requires an understanding of the socioeconomic and land-use conditions shaping ridership. 

In 2024, Metro used GIS to score and rank bus stops most in need of improvement, using continuous user feedback and real trip patterns to design a system that is more intuitive, flexible, and usable. To improve the transit experience, Metro has been implementing several safety measures, such as improved lighting and cameras at stations, and the TAP-to-Exit program to ensure all riders pay their fare. A customer-first approach views the journey rather than focusing on isolated or separate modes of travel. Yet, improving services around users requires real-time data, not just historical snapshots. LA Metro plans to provide a GIS app that coordinates what people are posting in real time about their experiences attending a major event, which can inform other riders.

A Customer-First Transit System

A focus on customers and an understanding of where they live and the obstacles they face should also include affordability, which Metro also addresses. For too long, transit-oriented systems failed to account for residents' individual circumstances, including their ability to pay. Just as with parking, local government can, with new digital tools and digital wallets, support differential payments or voucher access. Metro offers reduced-price transit passes for students and low-income customers, as well as a fare-capping program for TAP card users, to increase accessibility. 

A demand approach creates an opportunity and a challenge for traditional public transit systems, which, for too long, have considered their responsibilities only one of production, not of provision; of operating a transit system rather than arranging transportation access with public-private partners. Metro encourages collaboration by providing resources such as marketing templates and program playbooks. Through its "First/Last Mile" program, Metro partners with communities to improve safety and accessibility for people walking, biking, or rolling to and from transit stations and buses. Collaboration includes regional government partners, private companies and nonprofit organizations.

“We wanted to make sure that the community based organizations (CBOs) that Metro partners with are treated the same as our other agency partners,” said Vorhees, “Now, in our procurement process, we can use a CBO instead of a small business, recognizing that CBOs are more closely connected to the direct community.”

This focus on consumer behavior required Metro to rethink its mission, data use, and activities. But doing so will help improve both the daily transportation user experience and position the system for the large-scale changes of Vision 2028.