[1overcosc]

I too find STO confusing and when I lived in Ottawa I was never able to figure it out. In particular the Rapibus set up with 4 separate routes--the 100 that into the Hull CBD at peak, the 200 that goes into the Ottawa CBD at peak, the 300 that travels into the Ottawa CBD in the reverse-peak, and the 400 that travels to both Hull and Ottawa CBDs off-peak.. is kind of confusing.

Granted, I think both STO and OC Transpo systems are fairly confusing to outsiders; the difference of course being that OC users are familiar with their system so it seems less intimidating.

Both STO and OC also have a major weakness of not giving an easy way to quickly tell which routes are the frequent all day routes, which ones are the ones that only run at peak, which ones are the ones that are infrequent, etc. In OC Transpo's area, an example would be if you're at the Rideau Centre and trying to figure out the best way to get to, say, the Beechwood retail strip. There's 3 routes that could take you there--the 5, 6, or 7. The 6 and the 7 are the best options - they're both fairly fast and frequent all day, whereas the 5 is slower and infrequent off-peak. But there's no way to know that until you examine the timetables of all three routes.

There's plenty of examples of that in the STO.. the one I can immediately think of is if one was trying to get to Rivermead from Ottawa (say they got an odd job at the Rivermead golf course or something), outside of the peak, the best option is to take the 55 or 59 bus routes from Rideau. Many others that go there are peak-period, do not go to Ottawa, or are infrequent local routes. But again, there's no easy way to know that and to "pick out" the 55/59 without detailed examination of the timetables... the map just shows a big blob of routes heading down the pathway to Aylmer and around Rivermead.

OC Transpo is helping to fix that problem by officially separating out non-Transitway routes into the 3 categories Connexion, Local, and Frequent, giving each type their own colour which is shown on both bus stop flags and route maps. The legend on the map not only lists the colours for each type but also describes the characteristics of each type in a nutshell. This makes it easy to quickly get a good idea of what route you should take to get there. To go back to the Beechwood example, Route 6 and 7 are Frequent and would be coloured orange on the map, 5 is Local and would be coloured grey on the map. Don't know if STO has something similar planned.