Quote:
Originally Posted by Beedok
That's very Thunder Bay. Like the secret bus route(s) they've had.
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I caught a "secret" bus tonight! There was no one else on it, because it's secret.
I wasn't expecting it.
Because it's secret. 
Secret empty buses wandering around your town at night?
Thank a Union! 
BTW, Thunder Bay "had free fares" on New Year's
Day. I didn't ride the bus on New Year's Eve so I don't know if they did it that day as well. It could very well have been a rogue bus driver. We've had more than our fare share of bad bus drivers lately so really, who knows anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GernB
Lethbridge AB. A small and insignificant city to be sure, but still poorly served by its transit. Would it be so hard to have regular service every day? If the answer is that it's too expensive to run buses all day, why can't the city run the half-size buses they used to? Medicine Hat, which is half the size of Lethbridge does so.The new mayor here (since 10/13) is making all kinds of noises about expanding transit service to late friday and saturday (a great idea since we have 12,000+ post secondary students out of a population of roughly 105,000), sunday nights and holidays but I'll believe it when I see it.
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Smaller buses have the same engines and roughly the same mileage as larger buses, and the driver's time costs the same no matter what vehicle is being driven. Thunder Bay considered getting smaller buses, but decided the cost savings weren't enough to justify the tens of millions in capital required to obtain them
The other issues with Thunder Bay and small buses is that we really just have four really convoluted routes with a busy central section and two or four low-passenger suburban branches, and the same bus is running its entire length. A 30 foot bus might work in the suburbs, but once the bus gets to its "intercity" portion between our two downtowns, we either have to add a second bus to the run (which we currently do with the 40 footers, the buses leap-frog each other) or sever the suburban parts into new routes, requiring those passengers to transfer to the larger bus, which means we have to create a transfer point, which holds up buses on a system that already can't cope with having any kind of transfer points or layovers as it is. It also means that certain buses can't be used on certain routes, so we would need a larger fleet of buses, and therefore a larger garage to hold them. We're a small city, so the ability to run any bus on any route at any time with any driver is pretty important. We did sever one suburban route from its parent route and decreased its frequency and it seems to be working OK. The new transit system will have a system of very convoluted concentric/interlocking ring routes that will connect all points of the city to major destinations and get people to them faster. I am not sure it will work...
The entire "let's use smaller buses to save money!" scenario got so expensive so fast, it ceased to be a viable option in the early days of the transit study.
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