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+--- Thread: Grand River Transit (/showthread.php?tid=13)
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RE: Grand River Transit - KevinL - 05-12-2016
Unless you're getting the 200 or something.
RE: Grand River Transit - Canard - 05-12-2016
Yes, I should have been more specific. I was asking about the iXpress 200 route.
RE: Grand River Transit - timio - 05-13-2016
The new fareboxes are being rolled out this Spring.
Quote:GRT will begin the process of installing new fareboxes on our conventional buses later this spring. During the installation process, customers will encounter some buses with the new farebox and some with the old. GRT will have a handout and displays on the new farebox at the Charles and Ainslie Street terminals at the end of May - ahead of the installation.
The new fareboxes are the first step as we prepare to transition to electronic fares and launch the EasyGO fare card.
RE: Grand River Transit - goggolor - 05-21-2016
Apparently with the Spring/Summer schedule GRT has changed the stops for the 200 iXpress yet again, and removed the stops at Weber/Union and Weber/Guelph that were added last year. Now there are no stops between King/Erb and Charles St Terminal (except maybe King/Victoria, which seems to be variable).
Interestingly, although the Weber/Union stop is no longer on the time schedule for the 200, it still appears on the map on the front of the schedule - but if you look up the stop # through EasyGo the app says it is no longer in service.
RE: Grand River Transit - Pheidippides - 05-21-2016
GRT 2015 ridership is listed as 20,327,109 in this report to council about GRT customer service trends.
RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 05-22-2016
(05-21-2016, 09:56 AM)goggolor Wrote: Apparently with the Spring/Summer schedule GRT has changed the stops for the 200 iXpress yet again, and removed the stops at Weber/Union and Weber/Guelph that were added last year. Now there are no stops between King/Erb and Charles St Terminal (except maybe King/Victoria, which seems to be variable).
Interestingly, although the Weber/Union stop is no longer on the time schedule for the 200, it still appears on the map on the front of the schedule - but if you look up the stop # through EasyGo the app says it is no longer in service.
I can admit that these stops didn't seem very well-used, but one of them should have been kept. That's a very long distance not to have stops. It doesn't make sense to me to have neighbourhoods that will be served by Ion but which are not served by any frequent service now. And the rationale makes no sense: because Mount Hope and Breithaupt are again served by the 4, a half-hourly local service, it doesn't need to be served by the iXpress.
This isn't the way to build ridership. The Weber/Guelph stop was serving a lot of the same people who we will want to use the Grand River Hospital station in 2017. I guess they're going to get into the habit of driving instead.
RE: Grand River Transit - tomh009 - 05-23-2016
I think the real question is how many people DID use each of these stops per day? If it was a score or less, I understand about tilting the balance by skipping the stops and speeding up the travel for the other passengers. But GRT doesn't release that level of detail data, do they?
RE: Grand River Transit - Pheidippides - 05-23-2016
You can always ask:
opendata@regionofwaterloo.ca.
RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 05-24-2016
(05-23-2016, 10:25 PM)tomh009 Wrote: I think the real question is how many people DID use each of these stops per day? If it was a score or less, I understand about tilting the balance by skipping the stops and speeding up the travel for the other passengers. But GRT doesn't release that level of detail data, do they?
I believe based on my own anecdotal experience that it was probably more than a score (which is around twenty, I remember from Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech) but that they might require a lot more than that to justify a stop. Certainly the numbers of riders served at Union and Weber was nothing like that at McCormick (as an example).
I still think a few stops should be added to promote future ridership. Mary Allen and Mount Hope will be served by very good transit in the form of Ion in eighteen months’ time. But there are people there developing transportation habits that are based on the dearth of transit options that exist today.
I know transit users who are annoyed at the way the detours have been handled, and have even developed a negative perception of Ion given the disruptions construction has caused to their transit service. Some of them won’t be taking transit when Ion launches because they will have had to find alternative transportation. I don’t agree with that sentiment- disruption is inevitable and I think the GRT has done pretty well with detours. But with the 200 specifically, the schedule is so padded and it’s likely to spend many minutes dwelling on a given run, and its stop spacing is much wider than other iXpress services (or elsewhere on the 200’s route) that I think an extra stop is called-for, and would do a lot to build future demand for our big investment in Ion.
RE: Grand River Transit - tomh009 - 05-24-2016
Fair enough. Maybe one stop (instead of the two that were dropped) would be a reasonable compromise?
RE: Grand River Transit - goggolor - 05-24-2016
I used to get off at the Weber & Guelph stop occasionally. There were usually 2-3 people getting off at that stop, not a lot but it was a really quick stop along a route that the bus was going anyway. I could understand if they got rid of the Weber/Guelph and kept Weber/Union, but not that they dropped stops in that area entirely - did they really need the extra 30 seconds that badly?
I live in the Mt Hope area and bought my house specifically for transit access, but this summer I cancelled my corporate bus pass and started biking to work every day. That's a habit I don't expect to change with ION. The money I'm no longer spending on a bus pass I'm sinking into bike improvements and all-weather cycling gear.
RE: Grand River Transit - zanate - 05-24-2016
Oh god, the hits keep on coming today.
Can anyone confirm that the 200 iXpress Weber/Guelph and/or Weber/Union stops are out of service?
RE: Grand River Transit - Markster - 05-24-2016
The mentality at GRT is a bit annoying for those stops.
They existed on the 200 purely for coverage reasons. The idea that people are at least X metres from a stop. But it doesn't matter what the bus is, or where it goes. They started those 200 stops to replace the 4. These buses go entirely different directions, but for some reason, swapping one out for the other is a totally sensible change?
Mt Hope already lost access to the 7, so they should have had these stops for the 200 the entire time.
RE: Grand River Transit - MidTowner - 05-25-2016
Very well-put. The coverage target in Mount Hope and Breithaupt and Mary Allen is being met since the 4 stops along Weber and Union, but there’s no consideration of the fact that the 4 serves entirely different destinations than the 7 and 200.
I’m in the same situation as googolor (we’re probably neighbours), where I used the 200 and 7 pre-construction, and the Weber/Guelph stop when it was in use, but now bike. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that there are some people who, instead of biking, will drive a car. If they’re needing to get to one of the universities, they need to get there somehow.
When I spoke with GRT about this, their thinking was along the lines of the 200 stops on Weber being a necessary evil while the 4 was detoured off of Weber. The fact that the 7 was moved a few hundred meters to the west, making it impractical for riders needing to get into Waterloo, seemed not to have occurred to them in their planning.
RE: Grand River Transit - Markster - 05-25-2016
This mentality is one that I had to fight against when they were proposing stop placement for the 204.
Because other buses ran along Highland and Queen St on their way to the terminal, they didn't think they needed to serve that area with the 204, and so there was a 1.4km gap of service in downtown. The type of bus, its frequency, and where it's going are all secondary to "does a bus stop exist".