Quote:
Originally Posted by Uhuniau
I wish they were, but they are not. The rush-hour jams are mostly caused by semi-full suburban expresses. They should be abolished. Now.
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While it certainly used to be the case that we had a lot of semi-full suburban expresses, that's no longer the case and will be even less so in the future. I have seen plenty of westbound express buses - sometimes articulated buses - in the afternoon completely filled up. Even if there are some semi-full afternoon westbound buses crossing Bronson, generally they fill up at LeBreton and Tunney's Pasture.
They have been busy consolidating routes bit by bit in the last few years while the increasing popularity of suburban park and rides helps ensure a higher utilization of expresses than would otherwise be expected.
They could - and probably should - still consolidate all express routes into "Park & Ride expresses" (e.g. so a route '60' and '61' run at greater frequency would replace all the 60-series expresses to Kanata and would go to the Eagleson and Terry Fox P&Rs) but even if they do that the bus jams won't go away. They might form a bit later and clear ever so slightly sooner, but they won't go away.
They have now got to the point where there are simply too many passengers on too many buses. The City is now scraping the bottom of the barrel for efficiencies - hence the hope in temporary salvation from double deckers.
The truth of the matter is that the new City really dropped the ball a decade ago when it went ahead with rapid transit planning on the assumption that a BRT backbone could support a near doubling in transit use.