Quote:
Originally Posted by bomberjet
I seriously doubt having all those things will change anyone's perception in Winnipeg. You're not going to take the BRT because you have to pay on the bus instead of at the station? Sure people who know understand the advantages. But regular Winnipeg Jane Doe will not give two shits.
I do agree with all the points though. A lot of those things can be remedied. They do have pseudo level boarding. The curbs are higher (I think) and the buses kneel. It's up to the driver to pull right up to the edge, which can be the difficult part with the set-up of some stations.
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I would guess that the average rider (or prospective rider) cares a lot about reliability.
Many of those issues that people don't know/give a shit about are all related to that one clear priority.
Off-board payment means that everyone queues up to get on the bus, and the bus sits in the station, with other buses bunching up afterwards. At stops without passing lanes (Osborne Station, Graham Transit mall), this can be a substantial amount of time. If you have a dozen people queueing, especially if you have a wheelchair boarding, this is a non-trivial amount of time. If a bus gets caught in traffic trying to make the three-lane change on Main, if a bus has to go behind a cyclist at 10kph for two blocks, if a bus is stuck behind a taxi in the diamond lane, etc., etc.... these contribute to the unreliability of service.
And with transit, these small disruptions compound and you end up with serious deviations from scheduled services. For those whose commute involves a transfer, a late bus means a missed transfer, which means you can easily add 20 minutes to your commute.
And all of this is exacerbated by the psychological pain of sitting at a stop with a sign that has said your bus has been "due" for 10 minutes.
If you talk to people who occasionally take transit, you'll hear lots of stories of buses that "just didn't even show up". The impression created by all these delays and points of unreliability, along with inaccurate arrivals forecasts, is that buses just 'disappear'.
In short, the reason that it matters that we don't have those nice BRT features that nobody cares about is that they all impact reliability of service, which everyone cares about.