The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[Beedok]

That's very nice, but what about connecting routes? Doesn't really matter if the bus you need to transfer to ends at 12:30 or so.

[1overcosc]

The 95, 96, 97 bus routes run all night long, that won't change even after they're truncated to the Confederation Line termini.

On a night service tangent, the city hasn't yet confirmed what the service plans are for those few hours that the Confederation Line aren't running--I imagine 95/96/97 using mixed traffic routes and stopping in front of the stations during that 2am-5am gap.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by Taeolas

As a regular bus user in Fredericton, I'm satisfied with most of those changes. We should have gone to full hourly service years ago and we should be looking at adding Sunday service now; but I'll take what we can get. Hopefully in a year or two, if use increases steadily, we can see Sunday added in as well.

Planners can't wait for people to hopefully ride a subpar service in order to actually run service.

If Fredericton is serious about transit, then they need to start running Sunday service now, and also probably go to 30 minute service on all routes.

We have to stop being happy with little improvements, and demand transit networks that will actually provide an attractive, viable travel option.

For the two areas losing service, why no taxi bus service?

[1overcosc]

It's the great chicken-and-egg problem that many smaller cities & suburban municipalities face--they're unwilling to provide the cash necessary to improve service, which leaves them unable to build the ridership necessary to get the cash!

The only way out of this is to suck it up and increase the operational subsidy to provide better service, even if it means farebox recovery rate dropping in the short term.

Kingston is thankfully more than willing to do this; the city has been aggressively expanding service through increased subsidy for years now, increasing municipal funding by 10% a year. Its starting to pay off, too, last year Kingston Transit ridership shot up by 14% even though population growth was almost 0%.

[miketoronto]

So true. The thing I found funny while reading the Fredericton improvements, is the hourly service. It makes me think back to my trip to Germany last summer, where a resident of a small town of 10,000 was complaining that his bus only runs every 30 minutes.

[Beedok]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

So true. The thing I found funny while reading the Fredericton improvements, is the hourly service. It makes me think back to my trip to Germany last summer, where a resident of a small town of 10,000 was complaining that his bus only runs every 30 minutes.

Moose Jaw's 4 bus lines are apparently about every 30 minutes. I suppose 30k vs. 10k is a bit of a difference in size though, but still.

[Innsertnamehere]

Canada is usually half decent for small city transit,
Especially mid size cities such as Kingston, etc.

[1overcosc]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Canada is usually half decent for small city transit,
Especially mid size cities such as Kingston, etc.

Yep. I've had some interesting conversations with foreign students at Queens. Most American students seem to expect Kingston to have no transit all and are positively shocked to discover that no only do we have transit, it runs every 15 minutes on most corridors, uses shiny modern buses, and that we have a growing BRT-lite network.

[Taeolas]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Planners can't wait for people to hopefully ride a subpar service in order to actually run service.

If Fredericton is serious about transit, then they need to start running Sunday service now, and also probably go to 30 minute service on all routes.

We have to stop being happy with little improvements, and demand transit networks that will actually provide an attractive, viable travel option.

For the two areas losing service, why no taxi bus service?

One of the big thing with the plans that the planners had to make, was that all changes had to be budget neutral. If they had to go above 40% funding, the Council wouldn't have accepted it. So in order to even reach hourly service, they had to end all runs earlier (cut the current last runs basically), and cut the two outskirt routes completely (While keeping the hub and spoke system).

Shorter buses isn't acceptable because they would greatly increase costs, both in buying the new bus-vans, training drivers to operate them, training mechanics to maintain them, and keeping a different set of parts for that maintenance. (Freddy's fleet is pure diesel at the moment, all 20-30 buses of it)

In talking with one of the planners, I mentioned Sunday service, and he didn't seem interested at this time, even as a Phase 2. He'd prefer to try and set up a 15 minute route in the core (Regent to Downtown), though I didn't get more details.

My personal priorities/preferences would be:
* Hourly Sunday service.
* Half hourly Monday-Saturday service.
* Late night service (till 2AM when bars close; but even keeping routes going to Midnight would be a good start for late night movies)
* Capital Transit, to serve the region (Oromocto, etc...)
...other things...
* 15 minute service through the city core ( Regent Mall to Kingsplace)

For the goals and limits the committee were operating under, I do believe it is a good start. We need a lot more here in Freddy, but the money isn't really here Municiply, Provincially nor Federally to get an ideal solution.

I suspect that after the feedback from the public sessions, the route cuts will be undone (with a small budget boost; the committee does have the costs for those routes on hand) but they won't go full hourly like the core routes will be.

[miketoronto]

Sunday service should really be offered. People don't stop traveling on Sunday anymore.

I really can't stand 60 minute bus service. I was at a friends house tonight playing a game. We had to speed up the game and I had to rush out, to catch a 60 minute bus service .
Half hourly really makes a difference.

[1overcosc]

^ Honestly even half-hourly pisses me off. 15 minutes or less is when I become satisfied.

In Kingston, our conventional (non-express, non-special) routes all run every half hour all day long, but many of them are redundant enough that you effectively have 15 minute service for almost all trips barring a destination deep in the suburbs where you're stuck with half-hour. And, most beautifully of all, they're reliable. In Ottawa, the 'alternating routes to create higher frequency' set up is used, but fails miserably because of chronic bunching that results in the supposedly alternating routes coming at the same time. In Kingston, thanks to our virtually non-existent traffic congestion and lots of 'catch up' allowances placed in the schedule to allow late buses to recover, buses are on time. At some local stops they can come early but its usually consistently early--for example, my local stop where I lived last year the buses ALWAYS came between 5-7 minutes early, so just move the scheduled time up 6 minutes and you're always good. A lot of routes can run late at peak (when traffic is actually somewhat of a thing), and routes through the university can be late at random times, but otherwise you can trust the schedule.

[miketoronto]

I agree 15 minute is the optimal minimum. But for systems where that won't happen soon, or demand is lower, 30 is a good compromise. It is not as painful as 60 minute service

[Nouvellecosse]

Kingston buses run every 15 minutes? Well now I feel pretty pissed that transit in Halifax is so crappy by comparison. As far as I know we only have one route that's more frequent than 1/2 hour with many routes dropping to hourly at slow times.

[Beedok]

Gatineau has some routes that I'm not even sure why they bother.

[caltrane74]

Mock Up of New Eglinton LRT. The poster said it would be wireless, which was a surprise to me.

[J.OT13]

I wish they would have opted for wireless in Ottawa.

That's not the final colour scheme, is it?

[Innsertnamehere]

I don't believe it will be wireless.. This is news to me, wireless is expensive and I don't understand how it would work in relation to the tunnels as well.

No it's not the final colour. It's Metrolinx green in that photo but will be TTC red on opening day.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Sunday service should really be offered. People don't stop traveling on Sunday anymore.

I really can't stand 60 minute bus service. I was at a friends house tonight playing a game. We had to speed up the game and I had to rush out, to catch a 60 minute bus service .
Half hourly really makes a difference.

Alternatively, you could have slowed down the game and taken the next hourly bus.

[Spire]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Kingston buses run every 15 minutes? Well now I feel pretty pissed that transit in Halifax is so crappy by comparison. As far as I know we only have one route that's more frequent than 1/2 hour with many routes dropping to hourly at slow times.

To be fair, Halifax has several routes that run every 15 mins or better during mid-day, such as the 1, 2/4 combo, 7, and 60, and they've managed to remove many of the mid-day reductions to hourly service that used to exist. During rush hours, most routes run pretty much as frequently as you'd want them to run. That being said, there's a lot of things about the system that could be improved...hopefully the upcoming network redesign will fix that.

[Doady]

Kingston has a decent transit system; ridership is same as Sudbury (~32 per capita), way better than Barrie (~20 per capita), but less to St. Catharines (~37 per capita) and Guelph (~54 per capita).