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Originally Posted by Beedok
I suppose I should get that GPS thing then because schedules are pretty well useless in TBay.  |
Yeah they changed evening frequency but still aren't making connections. They might as well just run the buses around willy-nilly, we'd have the same effect.
Can't wait for the new network to go into effect next year. We find out exactly where the bus station will go in a few weeks, I think. May sometime?
Quote:
Originally Posted by GernB
Didn't mean to put students down and I'm sorry if it sounded like that. My point was that there is a large industrial park in the NE part of Lethbridge where approximately 30% of the population is employed, yet it has never been adequately served by transit. You can get a bus to the industrial area...but not into it.
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It's hard to serve those areas with transit, though, because a lot of the people working there can afford vehicles. The kids working retail jobs in the malls depend on the bus to get to work, but a father of two working at a refinery probably has a pickup truck and a minivan. The employment base for those industrial parks is also going to be scattered all over town, and only travelling to or from the area a few times a day. (All the kids on campus working at the mall can take the bus together because they have the same point A and point B).
Thunder Bay has one industrial park bus, it is the first thing transit does in the day. At 5:30am, a bus leaves downtown and goes to our two largest private sector employers, the pulp mill and the bombardier streetcar plant. But it is well used? I don't know. No other buses arrive to connect to it so it really only serves people that park downtown (in spite of all the parking at the plant), or those who live along the route it takes (assuming it even stops). There was an afternoon version of the same route but it no longer exists, probably because no one used it.
If the city did a trail run of a route there, would it be successful? You don't know if you don't try. We did a trail run of bus routes where the 40 foot, 41 seat buses literally travelled down dirt roads more than 20 minutes from the city centre. No one used it. Now we know! Thunder Bay's entire port has no public transit, at all. Several thousand work there. They all have cars, though. There is very little demand from the people working there to provide transit, and even a widely publicized survey designed specifically to figure out where transit is under-serving the community showed little need to extend transit there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GernB
No proper downtown terminal either...just people running acros the street all the time to make their connections. There were plans to build one-more-or-less equidistant from the 2 downtown shopping centres, but our brilliant city councillors killed it. North side terminal is in the middle of a bald prairie... south and west terminals are pretty much at the College and University respectively.
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If you want to compare to Thunder Bay, we've replaced one downtown terminal with stops around our new city hall, and the other was recently prettied up. We will build a new "superterminal" near the largest mall, which is between our two downtown cores.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GernB
And yeah...I would really love the GPS...all the stops have a transit Ph. #, and a stop # that you can supposedly access...only problem is there's never any answer. But hey, the Mayor got a raise so I guess it's all good.
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We have an automated system, have since the 1990s. I used to make fun of the computer's voice when I was younger, it was one of those deals where someone says all the needed words and then a computer strings them together so the inflection is really weird.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GernB
P.S. Maybe I'm thinking that Red Deer had a privately run transit system in the 70s & 80s? Just seem to remember when I was up there visiting a girlfriend at RD College back in the day that it was very hard to get around town and being told that were no buses.
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There might have been a transit strike. Red Deer took over the transit system from private operators in 1966. Red Deer does seem to have a lot of transit entering its industrial parks, but that city is, like, 50% industrial park.
Thunder Bay Transit, btw, is descendant from Port Arthur Street Railway, the first municipally owned streetcar line in Canada (and I think second in North America), so it's the oldest continually operating public (as in operated by the government, not a private company) transit system in the country.
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