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+--- Thread: Grand River Transit (/showthread.php?tid=13)
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RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 02-11-2015
I'm all with you that the way we have laid out our cities is inefficient, and intensification and mixed-uses are the way to go. I'm not sure if that will be possible large-scale while we still allow travel by car to appear so cheap to the user.
Even now, though, it's entirely possible to choose some other mode of transportation to get to work. In my neighbourhood in KW (which is composed of houses and apartments), you walk twenty minutes and you're at jobs in the downtown core. You can walk five minutes to a grocery store (though I admit that means not being able to drive between three different stores to get different "deals"). You can take the bus if you need to get to a mall or to restaurants that aren't downtown.
You mention Europe. It's very expensive to drive there. Fuel is taxed (almost) commensurate with the damage driving causes to the environment and the burdens it places on infrastructure; and parking is expensive and a hassle in any city centre (not even just big ones). Partly because driving is so expensive, more people opt not to and have supported the development of great transit, and the ability to leave closer to amenities.
RE: Grand River Transit - nms - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 10:10 AM)numberguy Wrote: I believe the Elmira bus service is still a township paid service. GRT is paid for by the cities (Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo). The townships tax do not get levied taxes for GRT, hence they get no service. Elmira pays for its bus service as an exception. For them to get more service, the township would have to pay more, or choose to be levied for the GRT. The leadership and voters would have to make that choice. I don't think it's a GRT decision.
I believe GRT is one of the few Region of Waterloo services that has a differential levy treatment. (LRT/ION is also not levied on the townships)
I think the Region missed a huge opportunity last year when they agreed that the Townships did not have to pay for the LRT. If instead, every property, regardless of location, saw their taxes raised specifically to pay for transit improvements, it would have made things easier in the long-term for transit planning. For instance, Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge's "Transit Levy" could have gone towards supporting the LRT and LRT-related transit improvements like increased feeder line service. The Township's "Transit Levy" portion could have gone towards inter-town or Town-City transit. Yes, the majority of the funding would still go towards the LRT, but the Region could implement simultaneous Township transit improvements as well.
The Region would have had a lot more flexibility in their transit planning. The conversation would have been about "When am I going to get the service that I'm paying for?" rather than "I don't want to pay for a service that I currently can't use, and therefore will never use, because the service doesn't yet exist." Instead, a number of vocal Township residents can defeat any kind of localized increase that would introduce increased transit service by raising hell about increased taxes.
Put a different way, can you imagine what services planning would be like if, rather than the current system to built-in development charges to support city infrastructure, individual neighbourhoods were taxed only when services were proposed and added to their neighbourhood? There would be a lot fewer services built (everything from trees to trails to libraries to fire stations) if individual homeowners saw their taxes go up in bits and pieces. Can you imagine how easy tree planting would be if every time a tree was planted in your neighbourhood, a portion of the bill was added to your property tax while your neighbours in the next neighbourhood over didn't have their taxes raised because they didn't have the tree planted there instead?
The Region was definitely shortsighted and will be paying for this for decades to come.
RE: Grand River Transit - BuildingScout - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 10:34 AM)MidTowner Wrote: Partly because driving is so expensive, more people opt not to and have supported the development of great transit, and the ability to leave closer to amenities.
You got it backwards. European cities have been walkable since before the car was invented. You can make parking as expensive as you want, I'm still driving for groceries in Canada, since it is so far away. Open a Metro store within walking distance and I'm trekking there even if parking is free.
My roommate a while back moved from Europe here at age 30. Never had a car, barely had a drivers license. After several weeks of waiting on the cold (with many others) for a scheduled bus 5 that never materialized and goes by every 40 minutes and then getting a job offer in an office park that is not served by buses he caved in an bought a used car.
Then you come and say: oh if only parking were more expensive he wouldn't have done so.
This is the reality that most people confront with current zoning in KW. A car is a necessity not a luxury. Let's fix the zoning first, let's make the bus goes by more frequently than that, and people will switch.
The number of people waiting at my local bus stop went up by a factor of 3-7x since the iXpress 202 was introduced. This is the way you get people into public transit: provide viable alternatives.
RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 12:40 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: Open a Metro store within walking distance and I'm trekking there even if parking is free.
I would be inclined to say that, instead of hoping that a huge company decides to open stores within walking distance of their homes, people consider grocery store locations when they choose where to live. They have no incentive to do that at the moment, since driving a car is so cheap (for the people actually doing it).
You're right about zoning, and you're right about intensification: if a lot of us continue to insist on single-family homes on forty-foot lots, few of us will be within walking distance of grocery stores. But, if traveling by car continues to seem so cheap, few of us will walk to grocery stores even when they are. Many trips taken by car right now are short enough that they could easily be replaced by bicycling or even walking. The reason they aren't is because the car user doesn't bear the true cost of the trip.
I'm not sure I understand your fixation on parking. I am meaning that more of the costs of the car generally should be covered by people choosing to travel by car. Parking is one; road infrastructure (and other infrastructure that is made more expensive by sprawl) is another.
I agree with you completely that transit needs to be improved. You need ridership to do that.
RE: Grand River Transit - Canard - 02-11-2015
Well put, MidTowner. I grew up in a small village of 600 people. And like every other kid in the town, I got my licence the day I turned 16, because when you live in the country, there is no option but to drive. I travel a lot for pleasure, all over Canada/North America, so putting on 50 to 100 000 km a year on my cars is the norm.
For fun this weekend I'm taking VIA to visit my folks, 400 km away. The cost of the ticket was $300, and I have to get them to drive 45 minutes to pick me up. When I drive, it's $30 in fuel in my Prius to get straight to their door. How much sense does that make? This is the fundamental problem that drives me nuts. I love trains and would happily take transit to get to and from work every day. But it just makes no sense, the way it's set up.
My commute to work is the same way. 1.5 hours on a bus one-way, or a 15 minute drive.
That being said I'm a huge transit fan, so quite often my leisure travels take me to cities with transit, just so I can ride/photograph their systems.
RE: Grand River Transit - BuildingScout - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 12:40 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: The number of people waiting at my local bus stop went up by a factor of 3-7x since the iXpress 202 was introduced. This is the way you get people into public transit: provide viable alternatives.
I just wanted to followup on my own post that since the iXpress is twice as frequent as the 5, and if we include the people waiting for route 5 itself, having 3-7x people waiting means that ridership at that stop has gone up by a factor of 9-21x !!
Again, that is how you make people leave the car behind. Offer them viable alternatives.
p.s. I'm not against more transparent pricing for car infrastructure (such as core usage charges like in London), in the name of fairness. But as a means of "discouraging" people from driving when there is no alternative is an illogical, confrontational, self-defeating move by public transit advocates.
RE: Grand River Transit - plam - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 12:54 PM)MidTowner Wrote:(02-11-2015, 12:40 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: Open a Metro store within walking distance and I'm trekking there even if parking is free.
I would be inclined to say that, instead of hoping that a huge company decides to open stores within walking distance of their homes, people consider grocery store locations when they choose where to live. They have no incentive to do that at the moment, since driving a car is so cheap (for the people actually doing it).
You're right about zoning, and you're right about intensification: if a lot of us continue to insist on single-family homes on forty-foot lots, few of us will be within walking distance of grocery stores. But, if traveling by car continues to seem so cheap, few of us will walk to grocery stores even when they are. Many trips taken by car right now are short enough that they could easily be replaced by bicycling or even walking. The reason they aren't is because the car user doesn't bear the true cost of the trip.
I live about 300m from the Sobey's on Weber and Lincoln (or even less). So of course I don't ever drive specifically there. Sometimes I would if I'm coming back from somewhere and stop there along the way.
As I was walking around yesterday to Sobey's, the Beer Store and Shoppers' Drug Mart, I was thinking about how they are all set back so far from the street and, with this snow and all the parking, it really is somewhat hostile to walk between these places, even though they're so close to each other. The Beer Store and Shoppers' Drug Mart are particularly bad: you have to walk through a parking lot to get to them. The downtown Kitchener locations are better in that sense.
RE: Grand River Transit - numberguy - 02-11-2015
(02-11-2015, 12:32 PM)nms Wrote: I think the Region missed a huge opportunity last year when they agreed that the Townships did not have to pay for the LRT. If instead, every property, regardless of location, saw their taxes raised specifically to pay for transit improvements, it would have made things easier in the long-term for transit planning. For instance, Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge's "Transit Levy" could have gone towards supporting the LRT and LRT-related transit improvements like increased feeder line service. The Township's "Transit Levy" portion could have gone towards inter-town or Town-City transit. Yes, the majority of the funding would still go towards the LRT, but the Region could implement simultaneous Township transit improvements as well.
I suspect that the Regional Council needed this exempt the townships from ION/LRT because of two reasons:
a) the precedent was there, GRT is area rated (they are exempt)
b) they needed the votes: Cambridge Mayor Craig was voting against it. If the township reps on the Council voted against it, it might not have been passed
http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/resources/2015_Preliminary_Budget_Book_pdf.pdf
Page 164/267 page PDF
Confirmed, GRT is area rated. Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo households will pay $235 for base GRT service, Woolwich households pays $39 for Elmira bus service, no GRT service or levy for the other Townships.
RTMP reserve fund (how the Region will fund some of its portion of ION capital costs, I think) is levied on KW and Cambridge only, $114 budgeted per household in 2015.
RE: Grand River Transit - nms - 02-12-2015
(02-11-2015, 04:46 PM)numberguy Wrote: I suspect that the Regional Council needed this exempt the townships from ION/LRT because of two reasons:
a) the precedent was there, GRT is area rated (they are exempt)
b) they needed the votes: Cambridge Mayor Craig was voting against it. If the township reps on the Council voted against it, it might not have been passed
http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/resources/2015_Preliminary_Budget_Book_pdf.pdf
Page 164/267 page PDF
Confirmed, GRT is area rated. Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo households will pay $235 for base GRT service, Woolwich households pays $39 for Elmira bus service, no GRT service or levy for the other Townships.
RTMP reserve fund (how the Region will fund some of its portion of ION capital costs, I think) is levied on KW and Cambridge only, $114 budgeted per household in 2015.
If the Region had built the LRT into a comprehensive transit plan that would include the Townships sooner rather than later, then they would have had no difficulty in getting the Township Mayors to vote for a plan that included Region of Waterloo taxpayer contributing. Instead they bought off the Township Mayors by letting them feel good about voting for this project without having to charge the cost to their constituents.
Hopefully future politicians will have the courage to remove area rated service fees.
RE: Grand River Transit - white_brian - 02-13-2015
I'm gonna throw a dirty word out there to straighten all these politicians up.... AMALGAMATION!! After all the hoopla we went through with LRT and now the water and sewage fiasco these people need to get there sh*t together. The region (the residents/voters) could save a whole lot of money if one tier was taken away!!
RE: Grand River Transit - mpd618 - 02-13-2015
(02-13-2015, 12:31 AM)white_brian Wrote: I'm gonna throw a dirty word out there to straighten all these politicians up.... AMALGAMATION!! After all the hoopla we went through with LRT and now the water and sewage fiasco these people need to get there sh*t together. The region (the residents/voters) could save a whole lot of money if one tier was taken away!!
That doesn't need to be a hypothetical scenario. Other municipalities had forced amalgamation, and the experience in those jurisdictions just does not support the claimed savings.
Given the quality of governance we have here and forward-thinking approaches on land-use and transportation planning, I think we have a pretty good deal relative to other municipalities in Ontario, even the amalgamated ones. (How's that working out for Toronto and Hamilton, by the way?)
Sometimes, getting your act together requires investing in infrastructure for the future. It's not necessarily pleasant, but the alternative is worse.
RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 02-13-2015
That's right: forced amalgamation in Ontario has had very mixed results. Many Ontarians now live in municipalities created by Queen's Park bureaucrats and politicians that seemed to make sense on paper, and in reality have had at best mixed results. I don't mean to sound like I am completely opposed to amalgamation- especially in situations where a central city is overburdened because of a declining tax base and affluent residents choosing to reside in nearby bedroom communities, I think it's a logical thing to do. Compare that with Centre-Wellington (which most people know as Fergus and Elora, now defunct entities), which were amalgamated just because they were pretty close together and someone assumed you'd be able to divide all the services in two. That's not the way it works.
mpd618 mentioned Hamilton, which functioned (to one degree or another) with a second-tier Regional government for a long time before recent amalgamation. I think there are a lot of good reasons for those municipalities to be joined, but it's going to take a while for any kind of savings, I would expect. And since this discussion was spurred on by the area-rating we use for transit in Waterloo Region, the City of Hamilton actually has area rating for transit, so residents of the 'Old City' pay several times more than residents in the suburbs. That kind of scheme isn't impossible even within an amalgamated municipality.
RE: Grand River Transit - numberguy - 02-13-2015
(02-13-2015, 12:31 AM)white_brian Wrote: I'm gonna throw a dirty word out there to straighten all these politicians up.... AMALGAMATION!! After all the hoopla we went through with LRT and now the water and sewage fiasco these people need to get there sh*t together. The region (the residents/voters) could save a whole lot of money if one tier was taken away!!
Not usually. Why? When municipalities amalgamate, workers have gotten the higher rate of pay of the amalgamated entities. Currently, the Cambridge fire department makes less than their peers in Kitchener or Waterloo (I think). Amalgamating would mean paying all of them the highest rate of pay. This caused some pain for some of the municipalities when GRT amalgamated transit services in the local big three cities.
Also, where people live is a choice. I know people who made the choice to live in the townships. They know that the level of service they will get will be less. They know they won't get bus service. The also want the lower taxes. It's their choice. Their leadership responds to their wants.
RE: Grand River Transit - numberguy - 02-13-2015
(02-12-2015, 05:32 PM)nms Wrote: If the Region had built the LRT into a comprehensive transit plan that would include the Townships sooner rather than later, then they would have had no difficulty in getting the Township Mayors to vote for a plan that included Region of Waterloo taxpayer contributing. Instead they bought off the Township Mayors by letting them feel good about voting for this project without having to charge the cost to their constituents.
The township leadership listens to what their voters want. Less services traded off against less taxes. Shrug, everyone has different wants and needs.
RE: Grand River Transit - Waterlooer - 02-15-2015
The last few days I've noticed the 200 iXpress buses are going down King Street to get from Fairview to Sportsworld and vice versa instead of taking highway 8. Does anyone know why the sudden change?