Strong lensing time delay cosmography has excellent complementarity with other dark energy probes and will soon have abundant systems detected. We investigate two issues in the imaging and spectroscopic follow-up required to obtain the time delay distance. The first is optimization of spectroscopic resources. We develop a code to optimize the cosmological leverage under the constraint of constant spectroscopic time and find that sculpting the lens system redshift distribution can deliver a 40% improvement in dark energy figure of merit. The second is the role of systematics, correlated between different quantities of a given system or model errors common to all systems. We show how the levels of different systematics affect the cosmological parameter estimation and derive guidance for the fraction of double image vs quad image systems to follow as a function of differing systematics between them.

• Received 10 February 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.083511