I thought this deserved its own thread. I went to the T's meeting yesterday where they presented their updated plan. This was helped by the consultants Nelson/Nygaard. The final plan will be unveiled in January 2016.
Here are my notes. I apologize for any inaccuracies as there was a lot of info thrown out.
1) This plan has not been presented to Fort Worth City Council yet.
2) Real time bus info will be available within this year. It also sounded like there would be new system maps. I heard the date of May 2016 thrown out, but I am not entirely sure if it relates to this.
3) They want to expand service to a broader area of Tarrant County.
4) They want premium services in high demand areas. Premium could be something like the Spur.
5) They want a frequent service network (early morning/late night) to the biggest destinations. Frequent service would be every 10-15 minutes at peak times and 15-30 minutes the rest of the day. 18 hours of service. More weekend service.
6) They want to reach beyond 820.
7) Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) - build on the Spur.
8) Better passenger facilities.
9) Improving first mile/last mile connections (Uber/Lyft).
10) Rebranding of the T - This would be one of my big takeaways. The T image is poor and it sounds like there will be a serious effort to do a rebrand of some sort.
There was talk of streetcars and light rail. Obviously that is what a lot of us would like. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on which side of the issue you are on, that is most likely not going to happen because of the political climate. I also would not expect the Southwest portion of TexRail to be built anytime soon. I am sure they will put up documents to download on the website soon that will contain all the specifics along with maps showing the proposed routes that would have their frequencies increased. From what I saw on the maps there, it looked like all the big transit corridors were taken care of.