The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[miketoronto]

Calgary has a PRIMARY TRANSIT CORRIDOR plan to improve bus service.
On primary transit corridors, bus routes will operate seven days a week every 10 minutes for a minimum of 15 hours a day (less frequent outside of those hours, I am guessing every 15-30 minutes).
The primary transit corridors will cover all corners of the city.
This is a very good goal, and I might add, one of the more frequent ones. Most Canadian cities have a minimum standard of a service every 15 minutes for a high frequency corridor. So Calgary is really taking a step with the 10 minute idea.
The plan also calls for a more grid route network and getting rid of some of the looping routes.

[Chadillaccc]

Oh wow, that's awesome. Where did you hear about that? I'd love to post a link to it in the Calgary Public Transit Thread!

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

Oh wow, that's awesome. Where did you hear about that? I'd love to post a link to it in the Calgary Public Transit Thread!

There are various reports which mention it on the Calgary Transit website, along with maps.
If you don't find it by tomorrow, I will post the links tomorrow.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

AB
Calgary Transit TOTAL : 576 400 per day. It's not what I call ''extremly high''. Ottawa is at 560 000.

If Ottawa was administratively structured like Calgary then Gatineau's numbers would be included in its transit system totals.

Viewed this way this adds another 70,000 daily riders or so to the total for "Ottawa".

[Beedok]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Calgary has a PRIMARY TRANSIT CORRIDOR plan to improve bus service.
On primary transit corridors, bus routes will operate seven days a week every 10 minutes for a minimum of 15 hours a day (less frequent outside of those hours, I am guessing every 15-30 minutes).
The primary transit corridors will cover all corners of the city.
This is a very good goal, and I might add, one of the more frequent ones. Most Canadian cities have a minimum standard of a service every 15 minutes for a high frequency corridor. So Calgary is really taking a step with the 10 minute idea.
The plan also calls for a more grid route network and getting rid of some of the looping routes.

15 minutes is a frequency Thunder Bay has on it's main route. Lots of routes in Ottawa are on like a 7-8 minute frequency, I think Toronto has a few on a 5 minute one.

[Dmajackson]

Halifax has one route that is ten minutes or better well into the evenings, and it also has its first transit corridor with a guaranteed bus bus every 10 minutes from Portland Hills to the Bridge.

[Mikemike]

Edmonton is still convinced that every single route has to meet timed transfer points every 15/30 minutes, so while the LRT is every 5 minutes other routes will have two buses together every 15 minutes. I'm aware of one route that goes to every 7.5 minutes during peak, but even there there are doubled-up busses.

[Chadillaccc]

Originally Posted by Beedok

15 minutes is a frequency Thunder Bay has on it's main route. Lots of routes in Ottawa are on like a 7-8 minute frequency, I think Toronto has a few on a 5 minute one.

So does every other city with areas that have multiple routs going through it. My house has busses going past it every 5 minutes because we're on a primary transit corridor.

Originally Posted by Acajack

If Ottawa was administratively structured like Calgary then Gatineau's numbers would be included in its transit system totals.

Viewed this way this adds another 70,000 daily riders or so to the total for "Ottawa".

I don't see how that follows. Calgary's transit numbers only include the city of Calgary, none of our suburbs.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

I don't see how that follows. Calgary's transit numbers only include the city of Calgary, none of our suburbs.

Do your suburbs have significant transit numbers?

The reason I included Gatineau is because it makes up close to a third of the Ottawa metro population.

Whereas only 10% (off the top of my head) or less of Calgary's metro population lives outside the city proper.

[Boris2k7]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

Well, that's off peak hours for certain routes. Of course there are indeed plenty of every 10, 15, 20 minute routes, but the windey suburban nature of the city makes bus travel very inconvenient and time-consuming. (I grew up taking the Evergreen bus, and it was often faster to walk the 30 minutes from Fish Creek Station to my house than to bus it.)

The buses are mainly valuable as feeders to the LRT, some inner-city routes like the #1 and #24 excepted.

Ohhh, I know this so well. You and I probably grew up only a few blocks from each other. Route 52 sucks arse.

[Chadillaccc]

Airdrie has a few thousand. No idea the exact numbers though. It is a city of 50 000 afterall.

Do you have any idea why Ottawa's transit usage is shrinking so significantly?

Last page of the document: http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2013-q1-ridership-APTA.pdf

[GernB]

I would love to see greater frequency on at least some transit routes in Lethbridge, but I don't think I'll see better than the 30 minute service in my lifetime. Would be nice if they were on time in a while too, and a GPS system to let users know how far away the next bus is would be nice. The system is very heavily used as there's little downtown parking and there's a large student population here (about 12-13,000 in a city of about 100,000) that depends on it as there's little parking on either campus.

Some kind of service to Coaldale and Coalhurst might be an idea as most people in those towns work in Lethbridge. At one time there was a privately run commuter bus service to those towns and to Picture Butte as well (Steve Kotch's Northern Bus Lines). But after he ran for mayor and finished third he got into a snit, packed his bags and left town.

The new mayor, Chris Spearman, says he going to "look into" improving transit service, but as I've said before, I'll believe it when I see it.

[niwell]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

Do you have any idea why Ottawa's transit usage is shrinking so significantly?

Last page of the document: http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2013-q1-ridership-APTA.pdf

I would assume it has a lot to do with federal (and other?) layoffs. Ottawa's transit use is highly dependent on federal workers and these figures seem to mirror job losses.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by niwell

I would assume it has a lot to do with federal (and other?) layoffs. Ottawa's transit use is highly dependent on federal workers and these figures seem to mirror job losses.

It might be a small factor but the decline in ridership for OC Transpo has been happening for a few years.

I'd say it's a combination of factors.

OC Transpo has a reputation for being poorly managed and employee morale is notoriously low, which leads to drivers being, um, not as friendly as they might be. I don't ride OC Transpo that often but when I do there is a noticeable difference in the attitude of OC drivers compared to the STO drivers in Gatineau. Of course there are cool OC Transpo drivers out there but generally speaking most Ottawans don't have a very high opinion of them. Whereas everyone in Gatineau seems to like STO drivers so there is likely something there. STO drivers actually greet every single passenger with a "bonjour". If 10 people get on at a stop the driver will in all likelihood say bonjour 10 times.

There was also a bad and bitter strike at OC Transpo a few years ago. Quite a few people stopped taking transit after that.

Also OC Transpo's services do not seem to have kept pace with the growth of the city, and the company has basically just continued to do the exact same thing it has since the 1980s, and hasn't really addressed what is a significant bottleneck in the downtown - the missing link in the transitway network.

It has also acted like it was still the 70s-80s and that the vast majority of workers work downtown and live in the suburbs, whereas many jobs in Ottawa have decentralized to office parks and the suburbs which are admittedly difficult to service with transit.

Finally, it is quite expensive to ride OC Transpo, at least when compared to a monthly transit pass in Gatineau or Montreal.

[Coldrsx]

Ridership gains has ETS bullish for 2014

"The latest projections from Edmonton Transit show ridership for 2013 shows the largest increase in all of North America in public transit. ETS manager Charlie Stolte says a bump of 4 million transit riders this year, to bring the total to 86.7 million is a 5% increase."

http://www.inews880.com/syn/110/12791/ridership-gains-has-ets-bullish-for-2014

[niwell]

Originally Posted by Acajack

OC Transpo has a reputation for being poorly managed and employee morale is notoriously low, which leads to drivers being, um, not as friendly as they might be. I don't ride OC Transpo that often but when I do there is a noticeable difference in the attitude of OC drivers compared to the STO drivers in Gatineau. Of course there are cool OC Transpo drivers out there but generally speaking most Ottawans don't have a very high opinion of them. Whereas everyone in Gatineau seems to like STO drivers so there is likely something there. STO drivers actually greet every single passenger with a "bonjour". If 10 people get on at a stop the driver will in all likelihood say bonjour 10 times.

There was also a bad and bitter strike at OC Transpo a few years ago. Quite a few people stopped taking transit after that.

True - I'd forgotten about this aspect in the years since I have lived in Ottawa. And never got to experience what I gather was a particularly nasty strike. Which I shouldn't have since I see almost weekly Facebook statuses complaining about some aspect of OC Transpo. I do remember half empty buses going completely past my stop on cold winter days. The #2 route seemed particularly bad at that - could never really figure it out since the stops are adequately marked... And having to show up 10-15 minutes before the scheduled time to catch the 117 because drivers liked to show up early so they could take coffee breaks.

Although Ottawa is a very transit oriented city for its size and layout, OC Transpo is the reason I laugh every time I hear complaints about the TTC. Particularly if the complaint is having to wait 10 minutes for a bus/streetcar (which isn't to say the TTC does not have issues as well).

[GlassCity]

Good to know whining about transit isn't a Vancouver-only phenomenon lol

[Chadillaccc]

Big news for Halifax Transit.


Transit First – Big changes for Metro Transit
JANUARY 6, 2014 | BY SEAN GILLIS

HALIFAX - Halifax Regional Municipality’s transit network should look a lot different in a few years. Metro Transit is advising Regional Council to broaden the scope of the ongoing five year transit plan and to undertake a full system review called Moving Forward, in order to create a new transit network. Metro Transit will propose this review to HRM Council’s Committee of the Whole on Wednesday, January 8th.
My opening Transit First article was supposed to launch in a couple of weeks. I had actually written an opening article, which wasn’t even about Metro Transit. News this big – a proposed network redesign – is so important that I quickly put together a new article.
A lot of public engagement was done by Metro Transit to understand if HRM residents were interested in and ready for big changes to the transit network. In the fall of 2013, over 1,600 surveys were submitted, 135 people attended public meetings, and 25 stakeholder groups were consulted. Metro Transit asked people what should be the primary goals of transit and what kind of services should be available. From their public consultation, Metro Transit learned there was strong support for transit priority measures – like bus lanes – and strong support for a network based on transfers (which can be very useful). There was also support to focus more resources on high ridership routes.

Full story: http://spacing.ca/atlantic/2014/01/06/transit-first-big-changes-coming-halifax-metro-transit/

[miketoronto]

I think the ridership decline has more to do than a loss of some federal workers.

The ridership decline probably has more to do with the fact that OC Transpo has not really improved service in years. In fact they optimized service a year or two ago, which caused some riders to walk further to transit, or have to transfer more, or face longer waits for buses. All this was done to save money, and it resulted in overcrowded bus routes, which required some service to be restored.

OC Transpo also is still stuck in running most bus routes in the outer areas every 30 or 60 minutes. They really need to build a frequent service network to all points of the region, much like Vancouver is doing.

OC Transpo does a lot of things right, and it is an amazing system for a city the size of Ottawa. But they do have to focus on providing more frequent service and routes to get people to all different destinations, and not just downtown.

Ottawa also has to rely less on federal workers for ridership success. Transit should be able to attract people for all kinds of trips, and not just to get to downtown government offices. This is an issue the STO also faces, as their system is much too focused on downtown commuters, that they tend to neglect a host of other trips they could capture.

[GlassCity]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

Big news for Halifax Transit.


Transit First – Big changes for Metro Transit
JANUARY 6, 2014 | BY SEAN GILLIS



Full story: http://spacing.ca/atlantic/2014/01/06/transit-first-big-changes-coming-halifax-metro-transit/

Looks to be an ambitious project, hope it works out. There is no way it'll go smoothly though