OC Transpo

[Catenary]

Originally Posted by bradnixon

I don't think we have an STO thread, so this seems the most appropriate place.

The new STO bus route network in downtown Ottawa (with most routes focused on Lyon station) starts June 21.

http://www.sto.ca/index.php?id=886&L=en

I believe this is a change from what was originally proposed - previously, the blue routes would have made a left onto Queen from Kent, then right onto Lyon in the bus only lanes to serve Lyon Station. The south west corner at Kent/Queen was modified to allow this movement, but it was still very tight and likely to cause issues.

As it stands now, the blue routes will not connect well with the O-Train heading back, which is too bad as it includes the RapiBus routes.

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by Catenary

I believe this is a change from what was originally proposed - previously, the blue routes would have made a left onto Queen from Kent, then right onto Lyon in the bus only lanes to serve Lyon Station. The south west corner at Kent/Queen was modified to allow this movement, but it was still very tight and likely to cause issues.

As it stands now, the blue routes will not connect well with the O-Train heading back, which is too bad as it includes the RapiBus routes.

Good catch, I think you're right. Jim Watson posted on a Memo on Twitter about this with more details, including that there will be a new STO stop on Kent north of Queen. I guess that will be the connection point for those routes.

https://twitter.com/JimWatsonOttawa/...785405959?s=20

[rocketphish]

Ottawa will look at buying more electric buses in light of $2.75 billion federal funding promise

Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Mar 04, 2021 • 46 minutes ago • 2 minute read



City staff will suggest by summer how many electric buses OC Transpo could acquire with new federal money announced Thursday, Mayor Jim Watson said.

Watson was at Transpo’s main bus garage as Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna announced $2.75 billion over five years to help transit agencies across the country acquire 5,000 zero-emission buses and charging equipment.

The city announced last year it would acquire four 40-foot battery-powered New Flyer buses in 2021 to assess how they work on Transpo’s network, starting in the fall. The $9.3-million purchase, which includes the infrastructure required to charge the buses, has $6 million coming from the city and $3.3 million from the federal government.

But even before those four buses arrive in Ottawa, Watson is bullish on significantly expanding Transpo’s electric-bus fleet and removing diesel buses from the transit network.

Watson said a report to the transit commission is expected this summer on the potential to add more electric buses.

A transformation from diesel to electric buses would bring the municipal government closer to achieving its target of wiping out its own greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2040.

The entire municipal fleet made up about 68 per cent of the city’s GHG emissions in 2018. The electric LRT system, which is in the middle of a major expansion, will also reduce the city’s reliance on diesel buses and lower its emissions.

Transpo dabbled in alternative bus technology when council in 2007 signed off on buying the low-emission hybrid buses, but the experiment failed because the hybrids didn’t perform well on the city’s expansive transit network. By 2018, the city was trying to unload the 175 hybrid buses.

Watson said the latest electric-bus technology “is significantly better and more reliable.”

“To simply put our head in the sand and never be bold and always timid on trying new things, we’ll never come anywhere close to reducing our GHG count and really helping save our environment,” Watson said.

The Canada Infrastructure Bank is also investing $1.5 billion in zero-emission buses and infrastructure.

The new federal zero-emission bus funding is positioned as a significant economic development program since there are at least four manufacturers in Canada, including New Flyer in Winnipeg, that build the buses.

McKenna, the MP for Ottawa Centre, said she sees big opportunities in the capital and other cities to transform bus fleets to a more environmental friendly technology.

The federal money could prompt the change.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more ambition from municipalities,” McKenna said.

jwilling@postmedia.com
twitter.com/JonathanWilling

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...unding-promise

[PHrenetic]

Good Day.

Gee.....if Jimbo is so green, then why did we not go for the Hydrogen Alstom iLint trains for the Trillium Line ???

They are going into full service in many rail lines in the E.U.

We could have had a viable test installation with the last expansion, and a full roll-in with Stage 2.

So........ Jimbo ??????? Where are ye, laddie ???????
<out of context, but he said it ==>"...never be bold and always timid on trying new things...." .

Sheesh !

[rocketphish]

City councillor calls for bus-hailing tech as answer to low transit ridership
OC Transpo has seen steep decline in riders since pandemic started, even fewer since January

Nicole Williams · CBC News
Posted: Mar 09, 2021 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

A city councillor is pushing for Ottawa to adopt a new transit model, one that works on-demand like an Uber, as OC Transpo continues to see low ridership throughout the pandemic.

Coun. Carol Anne Meehan said Ottawa's transit system is designed to bring people from the suburbs to the city's core, but as more people work from home the city is losing about $1 million a week running buses that no one is taking.

"We can't afford to continue bleeding money the way we are," she said.

According to OC Transpo, ridership has fluctuated throughout lockdowns and stay-at-home orders since the pandemic began. In March 2020, it dropped by 85 per cent. In January of this year, ridership was about 18 per cent of normal levels. It rose slightly to 21 per cent in February.

Meehan said she's confident people will return to the service "but nowhere near the numbers ... previous to the pandemic. It's going to take a long time."

That's why she's pushing for Ottawa to follow in Belleville, Ont.'s footsteps. It was the first place in North America to launch an on-demand transit service for an overnight bus route.

Meehan said the service wouldn't replace OC Transpo entirely, but would run in conjunction with the buses on underused routes.

Using Belleville's website, riders schedule a ride, indicating their pickup and drop-off time. The software processes that data — constantly updating itself to optimize all scheduled rides — and maps the best route to get all riders to their destinations as quickly as possible.

The site also sends riders confirmation notices by email and simultaneously sends the pickup information to the bus driver via a tablet.

According to Paul Buck, Belleville's transit manager, the average wait time for a bus is nine minutes, while the average trip takes about 12 minutes.

"The demand for on-demand transit was incredible. Within the first couple of weeks of service, we had over 200 registered users riding regularly," he said.

Like everywhere else, Belleville saw ridership drop since the pandemic, but Buck said the new system has allowed the city to continue operating more efficiently.

"We could cover that same amount of ground with eight buses and still meet all of our customer demand, still run our full hours of service."

In a statement to CBC, Pat Scrimgeour, Ottawa's director of transit customer systems and planning, wrote "we are currently exploring on-demand transit products, services and availability."

"This work is in a preliminary state and only exploratory at this stage and we have spoken with multiple vendors to gather information. At this time, no simulations are scheduled with any possible suppliers."

With files from CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottaw...-app-1.5941419

[OCCheetos]

The suburbs might be a good place for something like this since the ridership may end up justifying it, and they should all feed into a [future] local LRT hub to connect to the rest of the city. But every other part of the city can and should keep fixed routes for efficiency's sake.

I feel like the worst case scenario(s) with something like this is either they ride-hail the entire system for some reason, or they start offering ride-hail express to your destination across the city service — while charging normal fares. "Great ideas!" on paper, but soooo stupid in practice.

[GeoNerd]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

City councillor calls for bus-hailing tech as answer to low transit ridership
OC Transpo has seen steep decline in riders since pandemic started, even fewer since January

Nicole Williams · CBC News
Posted: Mar 09, 2021 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

A city councillor is pushing for Ottawa to adopt a new transit model, one that works on-demand like an Uber, as OC Transpo continues to see low ridership throughout the pandemic.

Coun. Carol Anne Meehan said Ottawa's transit system is designed to bring people from the suburbs to the city's core, but as more people work from home the city is losing about $1 million a week running buses that no one is taking.

"We can't afford to continue bleeding money the way we are," she said.

According to OC Transpo, ridership has fluctuated throughout lockdowns and stay-at-home orders since the pandemic began. In March 2020, it dropped by 85 per cent. In January of this year, ridership was about 18 per cent of normal levels. It rose slightly to 21 per cent in February.

Meehan said she's confident people will return to the service "but nowhere near the numbers ... previous to the pandemic. It's going to take a long time."

That's why she's pushing for Ottawa to follow in Belleville, Ont.'s footsteps. It was the first place in North America to launch an on-demand transit service for an overnight bus route.

Meehan said the service wouldn't replace OC Transpo entirely, but would run in conjunction with the buses on underused routes.

Using Belleville's website, riders schedule a ride, indicating their pickup and drop-off time. The software processes that data — constantly updating itself to optimize all scheduled rides — and maps the best route to get all riders to their destinations as quickly as possible.

The site also sends riders confirmation notices by email and simultaneously sends the pickup information to the bus driver via a tablet.

According to Paul Buck, Belleville's transit manager, the average wait time for a bus is nine minutes, while the average trip takes about 12 minutes.

"The demand for on-demand transit was incredible. Within the first couple of weeks of service, we had over 200 registered users riding regularly," he said.

Like everywhere else, Belleville saw ridership drop since the pandemic, but Buck said the new system has allowed the city to continue operating more efficiently.

"We could cover that same amount of ground with eight buses and still meet all of our customer demand, still run our full hours of service."

In a statement to CBC, Pat Scrimgeour, Ottawa's director of transit customer systems and planning, wrote "we are currently exploring on-demand transit products, services and availability."

"This work is in a preliminary state and only exploratory at this stage and we have spoken with multiple vendors to gather information. At this time, no simulations are scheduled with any possible suppliers."

With files from CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottaw...-app-1.5941419

She lost me at Ottawa to follow in Belleville, Ont.'s footsteps. It may work for a small Eastern Ontario city of 100k with ten bus routes. But in Ottawa with a metro of almost 1.5 million people and hundreds of bus routes this is a horrible idea even with buses on underused routes. The cost to even implement and maintain this system would be astronomical. Funny she has no problem spending $100's of millions on road widening of suburban roads that sit empty 75% of the day, but spending money on transit which ridership is temporarily lower is a major problem. Carol Anne Meehan continues to show that she is completely unfit to lead a major Canadian city. Very out of touch and short sighted.

[Truenorth00]

You know what would be a better idea? If they could figure out how to start electrifying the bus fleet to get operating costs down in the long run.

Forget Stage 3. The best thing they could do is figure out an an infrastructure and fleet general plan that electrifies at least half the bus fleet by 2030 and the whole fleet by 2035. The operating cost certainty will massively help with transit budgeting by removing an increasingly expensive and volatile cost: diesel.

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by GeoNerd

She lost me at Ottawa to follow in Belleville, Ont.'s footsteps. It may work for a small Eastern Ontario city of 100k with ten bus routes. But in Ottawa with a metro of almost 1.5 million people and hundreds of bus routes this is a horrible idea even with buses on underused routes. The cost to even implement and maintain this system would be astronomical. Funny she has no problem spending $100's of millions on road widening of suburban roads that sit empty 75% of the day, but spending money on transit which ridership is temporarily lower is a major problem. Carol Anne Meehan continues to show that she is completely unfit to lead a major Canadian city. Very out of touch and short sighted.

I could see a system like Belleville's improving evening or weekend ridership in the suburbs.... Barrhaven as a whole is probably analagous to Belleville. The results from Belleville were pretty impressive. They saw a significant increase in ridership on their late-evening service.

This is not going to replace fixed-route service entirely but I think there are neighbourhoods and times of the week where it's worth trying.

[Truenorth00]

Might be a good way to match service to demand in the suburbs outside the greenbelt. Could help build a better feeder network for LRT.

[Tesladom]

Funny I suggested an Uber-App Service a few months ago and people laughed at me.
The idea of running empty busses on fixed schedules is silly. The suburban busses are literally empty, I see them every day passing by my house. While I agree it is an essential service we really need to re-think and innovate. Running fixed schedules is what busses and streetcars did over 100 years ago

[Norman Bates]

Does nobody remember Tele-Transpo?

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by GeoNerd

She lost me at Ottawa to follow in Belleville, Ont.'s footsteps. It may work for a small Eastern Ontario city of 100k with ten bus routes. But in Ottawa with a metro of almost 1.5 million people and hundreds of bus routes this is a horrible idea even with buses on underused routes. The cost to even implement and maintain this system would be astronomical. Funny she has no problem spending $100's of millions on road widening of suburban roads that sit empty 75% of the day, but spending money on transit which ridership is temporarily lower is a major problem. Carol Anne Meehan continues to show that she is completely unfit to lead a major Canadian city. Very out of touch and short sighted.

That $100 million for stranherd covered much more then just "road-widening", for example the very expensive job of grade separating VIA. It also is adding grade Separated bike lanes.

https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/publi...-jockvale-road

Also, the Councilor that keep repeating that statement are fully aware that is entirely misleading.

As for the topic at hand Geoff in the UK made a good video in the subject https://youtu.be/z0ddExZbKD8

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by Tesladom

Funny I suggested an Uber-App Service a few months ago and people laughed at me.
The idea of running empty busses on fixed schedules is silly. The suburban busses are literally empty, I see them every day passing by my house. While I agree it is an essential service we really need to re-think and innovate. Running fixed schedules is what busses and streetcars did over 100 years ago

On-demand services cannot replace fixed routes entirely because they can't scale. Once you reach a certain level of ridership, fixed routes make more sense. (see here: https://humantransit.org/2019/08/wha...ansit-for.html)

But I think this has some limited applications at lower ridership times to provide coverage. Evening local routes in Barrhaven for example- the goal of these services is to provide coverage, not ridership.

That $100 million for stranherd covered much more then just "road-widening", for example the very expensive job of grade separating VIA. It also is adding grade Separated bike lanes.

I'd be shocked if the cycling infrastructure component of Strandherd was more than 1-2% of the total $100M cost. Let's not try to sell it is a cycling project. It is a road widening project.

[Multi-modal]

Originally Posted by bradnixon

On-demand services cannot replace fixed routes entirely because they can't scale. Once you reach a certain level of ridership, fixed routes make more sense. (see here: https://humantransit.org/2019/08/wha...ansit-for.html)

But I think this has some limited applications at lower ridership times to provide coverage. Evening local routes in Barrhaven for example- the goal of these services is to provide coverage, not ridership.



I'd be shocked if the cycling infrastructure component of Strandherd was more than 1-2% of the total $100M cost. Let's not try to sell it is a cycling project. It is a road widening project.

Undoubtedly most of the cost is in the grade separation, road widening, and utilities - but as cycling facilities are becoming more complex (protected intersections), costs as a percentage of the project are likely increasing.

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by bradnixon

On-demand services cannot replace fixed routes entirely because they can't scale. Once you reach a certain level of ridership, fixed routes make more sense. (see here: https://humantransit.org/2019/08/wha...ansit-for.html)

But I think this has some limited applications at lower ridership times to provide coverage. Evening local routes in Barrhaven for example- the goal of these services is to provide coverage, not ridership.



I'd be shocked if the cycling infrastructure component of Strandherd was more than 1-2% of the total $100M cost. Let's not try to sell it is a cycling project. It is a road widening project.

If your going by what accounts for the majority of the budget then it's a grade separation project.

But also again, to state that's it's costing $100 million to widen the road is entirely misleading, and the Councilor who's slogan this is is doing just that.

The bicycle route is just mentioned too show that it includes far more then "just widening the road"

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by bradnixon

On-demand services cannot replace fixed routes entirely because they can't scale. Once you reach a certain level of ridership, fixed routes make more sense. (see here: https://humantransit.org/2019/08/wha...ansit-for.html)

But I think this has some limited applications at lower ridership times to provide coverage. Evening local routes in Barrhaven for example- the goal of these services is to provide coverage, not ridership.

I agree. Certainly the O-Train along with all Frequent and Connexion routes need to stay on a fixed schedule. The Rapid routes as well, but we need to stop extending them into "Local" routes. This could work well for many (though not all) Local routes, especially in the suburbs, though there may be some inside the Greenbelt that could also benefit, especially late at night.

Originally Posted by bradnixon

I'd be shocked if the cycling infrastructure component of Strandherd was more than 1-2% of the total $100M cost. Let's not try to sell it is a cycling project. It is a road widening project.

Whether it is a road wide widening project that required grade separation or a grade separation project that resulted in a wider road, the grade separation was the lions share of the project cost.

Widening or no widening, without grade separation that crossing (and others like it) are an accident waiting to happen. It is unfortunate that such a high percentage of the urban/suburban level crossings are in Barrhaven, as the optics are bad.

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by roger1818

Widening or no widening, without grade separation that crossing (and others like it) are an accident waiting to happen. It is unfortunate that such a high percentage of the urban/suburban level crossings are in Barrhaven, as the optics are bad.

It's almost as if someone should have thought about the requirement for future grade separations when Barrhaven was designated as an suburban expansion area back in the 70s.

But Nepean was awesome because it had no debt, right??

[GeoNerd]

Originally Posted by Williamoforange

That $100 million for stranherd covered much more then just "road-widening", for example the very expensive job of grade separating VIA. It also is adding grade Separated bike lanes.

Yes those pesky gold plated bike lanes eating up all that budget! Imagine the nerve of those damn cyclists that pay the same amount of taxes towards these projects as car drivers getting a microscopic amount of infrastructure in return. It's outrageous! They should get nothing!

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by GeoNerd

Yes those pesky gold plated bike lanes eating up all that budget! Imagine the nerve of those damn cyclists that pay the same amount of taxes towards these projects as car drivers getting a microscopic amount of infrastructure in return. It's outrageous! They should get nothing!

Read it again, I literally stated that the expensive part was the grade seperation. The addition of the bike lane was a separate sentence to note other things included in the project, the link I provided has the full list.

And thus my point, which was calling the entire project "just a road widening" is misleading, especially do if one is a councillor who should know the details.

Now that's settled how about back to topic which is OC Transpo and currently if using DRT is a good idea for Ottawa.

Which on that point, is not something the can really be implemented far and wide, and if were looking to save money i'd suggest eliminating the connexion routes which are on majority oriented to the suburban to downtown office commuter.

With DRT tried for milk run routes in the suburbs along the lines of what OCCheetos suggested.