Design Your Transit System

An interactive budgeting game for exploring transit costs, benefits, and priorities.

  • Foothill Transit
  • Orange County Transportation Authority
  • City of Denver
  • RTC Southern Nevada
  • Salt Lake City
  • TheBus City and County of Honolulu

Community participants and transportation planners

Public engagement · Interactive surveys · Data collection

Transit agencies & planning partners project overview
01 / Transit agencies & planning partners
Design Your Transit SystemView full screenshot
  • Foothill Transit
  • Orange County Transportation Authority
  • City of Denver
  • RTC Southern Nevada
  • Salt Lake City
  • TheBus City and County of Honolulu

Community participants and transportation planners

Public engagement · Interactive surveys · Data collection

Engagement & resourcesMaps & decision toolsData & operations

The challenge

Agencies wanted to understand which transit improvements people would prioritize within a limited budget.

Our work

We built customizable budgeting games where participants select improvements within a fixed budget and see how their choices affect costs and benefits. Agencies receive results as CSV files to compare priorities across groups.

Customized to each agency’s decisions

Working with Nelson\Nygaard, we tailored the applications to the improvements each agency was considering and the benefits it wanted participants to weigh.

Participant feedback

Participant feedback has favored the game format over a conventional survey: people can contribute their priorities while learning why an agency cannot fund every improvement at once.

Agencies and communities served

Implementations have included Long Beach Transit, Boulder Transit, BART, Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, Lincoln Transit, Chapel Hill Transit, Foothill Transit, Ohio DOT, Salt Lake City, Fort Worth Transportation Authority, Orange County Transportation Authority, RTC Southern Nevada, and The Kauaʻi Bus.

Planning a similar project?

Tell us about your requirements and the people who will use the system.