Transit Improvements
Transit Services recently announced the need to change from our existing 30 minute service during peak times to a 40 minute service. The change is more an admittance of the reality of our current situation rather than a policy change, nevertheless it appears that at the very point when the most people need public transit we are not able to accommodate them very effectively.
As it stands now, most bus routes in the City leave and return to the square downtown, this is referred to as a radial system. With the increase in ridership and size of our city perhaps we have reached the limits of our current radial configuration.
We have been told that 10% of the time spent during the day is in the square waiting for people to transfer between buses. This will be dramatically improved upon the development of a more efficient multi-modal transit node however, with a radial design ALL of our buses must wait for the slowest bus to arrive and transfer passengers before leaving the downtown. The whole system must accommodate the weakest link.
In addition this built in inefficiency; the radial system as we currently have fails to provide direct transportation to and from the commercial centres (as established during the Commercial Policy Review) to the surrounding community.
As an example, if you live in the west end south of the tracks and take the bus to go grocery shopping you cant take a bus back home unless you first go back downtown and transfer to another bus to take you back to the west end. It gets even worse if you live on the north side of the tracks because you can’t even get to the shopping area without going downtown and transferring first!
Existing Situation
The current system can be represented by a graphic that looks a lot like a flower. All routes begin and end at a central point. As you can see, one of the drawbacks to this design is the concentration of buses the closer we get to the center transfer point.
Possible Solution
The recent Commercial Policy Review established four nodes within the city as areas for higher intensity commercial and residential development. Imperial, Paisley, Elmira Rd intersection in the west end is an example of this policy in action. These nodes could be serviced with shorter, higher frequency bus routes to the surrounding neighbourhood with direct express service to the downtown core and a perimeter route connecting each node.
This type of transit configuration would increase local access to shopping areas while providing direct high frequency service to the city centre. The shorter higher frequency service combined with shorter higher frequent express service to the downtown would eliminate the need for buses to wait to transfer passengers. As an example, in Toronto people don’t necessarily know what time the bus arrives, they just know the next bus will arrive shortly.
Please provide YOUR comments and ideas.
August 12th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I do agree with much of what you are saying here. Guelph Transit has done many reports of the years on where they see the routes progressing to but many people do not know that these reports are out there. The problem has been, no one has kept Transit on track with these plans due to the loss of the Guelph Transit Advisory Committee a couple years ago. On top of that, the warning signs that the system was strained have been known since the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and while there have been some improvements with added bus routes etc., the overall system was left untouched.
What I would suggest Council to do is direct Transit to do a formal review of the entire system now. Working with citizens, experts, and other groups, a report of recommendations could easily been brought forward as part of the 2008 Budget. I don’t just want to add more drivers and buses as it would seem to be a waste without addressing the bigger problem of the route structure we have now.
Personally, I would like to see the mixed system of radical and perimeter type routes. We currently have nodes at Stone Road Mall and another at the University Centre loop plus Downtown. I do agree additional nodes would be helpful, along with more ‘direct’ routes (one example long talked about is a bus going through the centre of the city north to south from Woodlawn/Woolwich down Norfolk, up Gordon and out to St. Clair and back)
Some people will hate to have to transfer from one bus to another, but in many growing cities this is the norm. Just as long as the buses on timed properly (we have that great GPS system in place now might as well use it to the fullest), it would be seemless operation throughout.
I would hope is for a formal review of all past transit materials, and additional public meetings and the creation of a formal plan of action that transit can follow to make the system efficient and accessible for everyone.
August 15th, 2007 at 1:23 am
Re: buses: radial vs grid. I spent 20 years in Toronto and grew up with the ever expanding Toronto transit. Toronto uses a grid system where you always transfer at major intersections. The duty of the drivers is to keep the buses rolling and hit the various intersections at designated times. It works very well. With this system falling behind doesn’t do much harm?
In Guelph we have 14 bus routes converging in the square twice ( plus many back up support buses) an hour. If a few routes are tardy then almost every bus in the square sits and waits. This is dreadful. I take buses form the square all the time and i can tell you they idle one third of the time. I have one specific trip I take once a week on any one of three weekdays and most buses get in the square five minutes early and leave five to eight minutes late. Blame this on radial system.
I am a member of Carden street petitioners and we did a survey of 80 square area merchants and gave results to every member of council and put it is both newspapers. An overwhelming majority of merchants don’t want the buses totally out of the square because the buses put over 2 1/4 million possible consumers in the square annually.
Fortunately they also said they favour cutting the number of routes to the square by whatever amount it takes to eliminate the over congestion and the inefficiency. I cannot even guess how many routes should be pulled out of the square but if i was to make a wild eyed guess perhaps cutting seven routes would solve the problem. I leave this to experts. As many pundits have speculated there is a vast supply of large spacious intersections that could be useful as minor transfer points outside of downtown. In some cases they might stimulate existing enterprises.
Drawing out the oversupply of routes in the square should have been slowly commenced ten years ago. Now they have a mess. An enlighted mix of grid and radial will solve all the problems currently under discussion and would almost be cost free and won’t destroy any neighbourhoods with such horrific perversions such as central transfer hub complete with bus bays land acquisitions street closings business and residential compension packages and costly court cases. Alex Carden street petitioners. (Carden street petitioners also did survey of 60 arrivals of commuter trains inter city buses go buses. There is zero to 3 commuters per day who switch to Guelph transit so moving 2 1/4 million people to Carden street to interface with nobody is senseless. Profiling the travelers and examining their patterns explains how this is not and can never be a useful idea. ((the inter city travelers get off the buses long before arriving downtown))
September 5th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Hi Mike,
My wife and I had my first experience this am with the new service. We have been occasional riders in the past from our home to the University. I had heard about the new schedule and this morning checked the website to see when the next bus was coming. We left home in plenty of time and were at the bus stop 25 minutes before the next bus time (according to the next bus link). We waited there for 12 extra minutes passed that time, realized there is no way we will get downtown and catch the bus to work and be on time so we went home and jumped in our car and were at work in few minutes.
This sucks and is not acceptable. I would much rather pay an increased fare for good service than 2.00 for a horrible service. I suppose we just won’t use it since it looks like we need to leave home 1 1/2 to 2 hours before we need to arrive at work.
On another related issue, I wonder why the school board and city can’t make a deal like the University students have so that every high school kid pays a mandatory fee for cheaper bus service. My children are passed high school now but for years we had to keep them supplied with expensive transit tickets to go to school. What a surprise when our oldest attended U of G and received a pass for the semester at a bargain price.
Keith Harron
September 5th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
As a parent of two school age kids I understand exactly what you are talking about. I have been preaching that very suggestion with staff for months – this whole 40 minute debacle may very well turn out to be the catalyst we needed to push for big changes with our transit system.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
40 minute service is unacceptable because it fails to take into account that people’s work hours tend to start at i.e. 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. I now need to get on the bus an hour before I start work which is ridiculous.
Also Nextbus is so unpredictable that, as a courtesy to Transit riders, it should be taken offline until the issues have been resolved. A message like “The Nextbus service is currently unavailable. We are working on resolving the issue and hope to have it online again soon.” would be preferable to the way it is now. There’s absolutely no point in calling it, and yet it’s the only way we have of finding out when the bus is arriving at many of the stops since the times were removed from the signs.
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:40 am
Hello Mike,
I have read your proposal to improve the routing design of our transit system. I would agree that the current system of parking buses downtown with their engines running and filling the air with diesel exhaust to wait for the slowest buses for connections is inefficient as well as environmentally destructive. It also adds to a major physical congestion to the downtown area which repels me from that area. However, the concern that I must reinforce from our recent telephone conversation, is that the new route design that you have communicated here will result in a significant cost increase to this already heavily subsidized, yet underused, transit system. Let’s face it, the system hardly pays for itself. and the fares are a ridiculous bargain for those who can chose or are unable to afford car ownership. While Toronto bus fares approach $3 a ride ,a much more heavily used system, our politicians, yourself included, have failed to increase fares to reflect increased costs of running the system. The effect of this is to shift costs on the backs of property owners of the city instead of those that use the system. Until the citizens of this community demonstrate a commitment to using the transit system more regularly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to dump more of the tax payer’s hard earned money into the increasing costs for fuel. maintenance, bus replacement, and employee wages and benefits. In spite of what Mr. French has reported, anyone with limited observational skills can see that on most routes in this city, these big buses trundle around the city usually with less than 4 people in them in off peak hours, adding to our air pollution. So if this new route design does not cost the property owners of this city an increaased tax burden on a per person basis, then I would heartily support these modifications to the sytem based upon the improvements in time efficiency and environmental improvements. By the way, the argument posed by such politicians such a Ms. Laidlaw, that we should all give up our cars to use the transit system in Guelph is a red herring. The reality is that the Guelph community has been planned by municipal and provincial politicians to be a bedroom community where the majority of working residents must commute to jobs in surrounding communities where jobs exist. It’s unreasonable to expect commuters to use public transit within the city on a regular basis when they already have access by necessity to the more time efficient, and more costly alternative of private car ownership. If you think that transit fares are too high now, just observe the number of lower income people in areas such as Willow Road who chose the very costly alternative of taxis to move themselves around the city.