Grand River Transit

[ac3r]

About a 2% increase to both monthly passes and EasyGO fare payments, well below inflation.

Have you noticed how much car, car insurance and gasoline prices have gone up in the past few years?

Whether or not it is below inflation doesn't matter. People are still struggling to afford life. Sure a mere 24 extra dollars on a transit pass per year may not be a lot of money to someone like you or I, but for others any sort of cost increase can be extremely hard. The elderly with low pensions, students, those on ODSP or even just people making minimum wage (or hell even low 20s) feel every little cost increase they are faced with. They only just recently increased the fares and if you followed the public reaction to that online, people were pretty upset with that. Now they want to raise them even more.

Granted, I realize the fares have on average been lower here in Waterloo Region than elsewhere which is great for people. But the cost increases are going to make people start to struggle. Worse, it'll make people start to pivot away from transit use (even if that will ultimately cost them more). Time is an extremely valuable commodity, so buying an old beater can often much more useful to someone if it means they don't have to spend 2+ hours taking an unreliable bus around the city all day or have to worry about having a bicycle regularly stolen or showing up to work smelling and having your hair screwed up from a helmet.

GRT could easily save money too. How many tens of thousands of dollars did they just burn wrapping buses in stupid pride flags, silk screening shirts and getting rainblow sunglasses with the GRT logo made? Just for empty virtue signaling. I can't speak for all people obviously, but I'm not even heterosexual myself and I don't feel like I need a "Ride with Pride" rainbow sticker by the door to let me know I can be comfortable riding the bus. Serves no purpose other than to burn tax dollars.

[ac3r]

*sigh* yeah, this is a tired old trope from ac3r. I can tell you every example he gives is directly contradicted by the Netherlands. 65 year olds riding their bikes, check, young office workers, obviously check, people with groceries, kids, check check.

Bikes are much more versatile for the same reason cars are versatile. Buses here are not…underinvested (see my article) but they have low frequency and low ridership compared with other European nations.

The only difference is our infrastructure.  65 year olds, people with kids, people getting groceries, they don’t mind biking, they do mind having their lives threatened. Sadly people with an attitude like ac3r are all too common.

We're not the Netherlands, though. Cycling happens to the extent it happens there because of the differences in cultural attitudes towards it...but most of all, the urban design of cities. And by that, I don't just mean bike lanes and stuff. The cities are dense because they are historically built that way. We have a continent that - outside of a tiny handful of old metropolitan areas - has been designed for car use for roughly a century, unfortunately. From where I am currently writing this post, there are only 2 small convenience stores within a 10-15 minute walk. There's a Zehrs about 20 minutes away, but the walk is annoying. Cycling to it would be actually suicidal. But from my home in Toronto, there is more around me in a 10 minute walk than there is in entire wards of Kitchener. Understand? The structure of these cities is different. Cycling works in some, but not in others. It barely works here.

More people would bike here if Waterloo Region felt like any other European city. That is to say, having things close enough that it's easy to cycle to, having the infrastructure, having fewer cars that will murder you around and so on. But we don't. Even if we put bike lanes all over the region from downtown to the townships, everything is still extremely spread apart. It's just a huge pain in the ass to take cycling seriously as a main form of transportation, which is why I mention Lycra. Most people just want to get around, they don't make cycling their entire personality like an annoying vegan nor do they have any desire to become cycling militants that advocate for turning everything into a bike lane.

This is why I think it makes more sense to spend money on more transit improvements - at the present moment, at least. Yes, build more bike lanes and MUTs of course because we still need those, but they need to be built strategically. We spent about 6+ million on this cycling grid alone. Was it necessary? Not really, I think. You have always been able to bike around downtown just fine. It's not like cars were flying down Ontario Street at 50 kilometers an hour. It has always been a place where cars, cyclists and pedestrians have been able to share just fine. I tend to see more actual vehicles mistakenly driving down these bike lanes than I do actual bikes (though yes I realize cyclists do use them).

At present and in the short term, all that money could have gone into improving bus services which benefit a hell of a lot more people than they do bike lanes. 6 million could have paid for a lot more drivers. Bus stop improvements (seats, shelters, displays, trash cans). More frequent service on routes. 6 million is a good chunk of money. In the meantime, slowly densify the city and yes absolutely invest in MUTs and such and put them in strategically useful areas so that people can in fact get between more distant places with ease. Then as the population density and building density increases, put more money into adapting roads with bike lanes, wider sidewalks etc. I mean when I lived in Kreuzberg, Berlin the population density was a shocking 15,000 per square kilometer. Transit and bike infrastructure makes total sense there. But here? The entirety of Waterloo Region doesn't even have 400 people per square kilometer.

[plam]

You've seen the pictures of car-choked Amsterdam in the 70s, yes?

[ac3r]

Yes, but that's still not a good comparison. Amsterdam has always been a dense city with or without cars. It's also extremely small. You can walk from one end of Amsterdam to the other in just over an hour. It is much easier to transform the infrastructure of a city when the city itself is tiny and not even 1 million people live in it. They had the benefit of being dense, very small and having a government willing to figure out how to fully maximize its land use because, well, the country itself doesn't have a lot of useful land. Bike usage is high there because the country/cities are tiny, they have fairly mild weather year round and they really could not afford to waste space on roads.

It's a much different story to transform a North American city in this way. We are doing it, thankfully, but it'll be a slow process...especially since we had a century of oil company propaganda that created a generation of room temperature IQ carbrained fools, which in turn created more and more demand for roads and parking and perpetuated it for an entire generation and beyond.

Anyway this is less about cars or bikes and more about terrible local transit in an extremely car centric urban area. Regardless of what you believe, more people would benefit in the immediate term from improved bus services than they are going to benefit from a bunch of novelty bike lanes because we are currently and will remain for many decades, a car centric place. It will take time for denser development to catch up. There are not going to be any true 15 minute neighbourhoods in Waterloo Region for a long time. As such, we are still going to need investments in transit improvements but unfortunately GRT doesn't really do that.

That's my point, not that bikes suck and we shouldn't care about them. It's that local transit sucks. We are not the Netherlands or Finland, we are Waterloo Region and so we should be trying to develop our services in a way that maximize benefit for the greatest number of people right now...and for us, that means improved buses and light rail prioritized rather than bike lanes. I mean yeah build those too, but build them intelligently. Since this forum loves to use Amsterdam as an example of an apparent utopia, I must ask, how well do you guys actually know about the urban history of that city, beyond what Not Just Bikes and other YouTubers waffle on about? Before there were bike lanes all over the place, Amsterdam invested very heavily into both rapid transit and bus improvements to get people around. It got people from A to B very fast and reliably. They began to build a metro system in the 1970s. Trams were expanded and improved. Buses also saw investment. The city has always been dense, so walking the last mile to work/school/shops/back home and so on was easy enough. Over time, bike use grew because it was handy, so people advocated for more improvements to that infrastructure. They didn't just start turning roads into bike lanes, they improved higher order transit first and then evolved the rest. Doing that is especially important in Waterloo Region since we're already car centric and it can take a long time to go anywhere and it'll take a long time before you get your average car user to be able to make biking anything more than an exercise hobby.

[jeffster]

Yet, Canada has a car ownership of 790 vehicles per 1,000 people.

Finland, well, they are also 790 vehicles per 1,000 people.

Netherlands, they are a little lower, at 588 per 1,000 people (still more than one per family).

Should also be noted, the Netherlands are roughly 200km by 200km in size (41,000 km2). That's it. And yet you still have 588 cars per 100k. For comparison, Southern Ontario is 114,000 km2, almost 3x the size, with about 4.5 million less people.

[danbrotherston]

Yet, Canada has a car ownership of 790 vehicles per 1,000 people.

Finland, well, they are also 790 vehicles per 1,000 people.

Netherlands, they are a little lower, at 588 per 1,000 people (still more than one per family).

Should also be noted, the Netherlands are roughly 200km by 200km in size (41,000 km2). That's it. And yet you still have 588 cars per 100k. For comparison, Southern Ontario is 114,000 km2, almost 3x the size, with about 4.5 million less people.

Honestly, this has been the biggest surprising moving here. The country is HIGHLY driveable (outside of Amsterdam). Basically every single one of my neighbours owns a car. We are the odd ones out by not having one. Most have only one, but a few have two. Parking is free everywhere but the centre of the city. Right now they are trying to make all curb parking permit based (which is most overnight parking in the city, most people don't have a garage or driveway) and there is all kinds of uproar and petitions going on about it (albeit less entitled--"I have a RIGHT to park free" and more utilitarian--"expenses are high enough already" than in Canada).

People who claim "oh that's just Europe" are naive at best.

The land use is certainly more dense, but that matters less for cycling. Yeah, walkability depends hugely on the built form, but cycling extends the distance you can move. The suburb I live in is not particularly walkable. The grocery store I go to is almost exactly as far away as the one I went to in Kitchener, but it feels much closer, because I don't have multiple near death experiences on the way there (or realistically, I don't have to choose a more circuitous route and go to a farther grocery store just to avoid unsafe roads). We should still stop sprawling and do infill development, but cycling is the secret sauce that can make the garbage land use we already have less car dependent.

[tomh009]

About a 2% increase to both monthly passes and EasyGO fare payments, well below inflation.

Whether or not it is below inflation doesn't matter. People are still struggling to afford life. Sure a mere 24 extra dollars on a transit pass per year may not be a lot of money to someone like you or I, but for others any sort of cost increase can be extremely hard. The elderly with low pensions, students, those on ODSP or even just people making minimum wage (or hell even low 20s) feel every little cost increase they are faced with.

You do know about the reduced fare program, right? 48% reduction in passes for people with low income. And in that scenario, the increase is only about $1/month. Yes, it's an increase but it's nothing compared to the food inflation recently.

As for your claim about people spending 2h to get somewhere on transit, that's been debunked enough times here already.

[plam]

Honestly, this has been the biggest surprising moving here. The country is HIGHLY driveable (outside of Amsterdam). Basically every single one of my neighbours owns a car. We are the odd ones out by not having one. Most have only one, but a few have two. Parking is free everywhere but the centre of the city. Right now they are trying to make all curb parking permit based (which is most overnight parking in the city, most people don't have a garage or driveway) and there is all kinds of uproar and petitions going on about it (albeit less entitled--"I have a RIGHT to park free" and more utilitarian--"expenses are high enough already" than in Canada).

People who claim "oh that's just Europe" are naive at best.

The land use is certainly more dense, but that matters less for cycling. Yeah, walkability depends hugely on the built form, but cycling extends the distance you can move. The suburb I live in is not particularly walkable. The grocery store I go to is almost exactly as far away as the one I went to in Kitchener, but it feels much closer, because I don't have multiple near death experiences on the way there (or realistically, I don't have to choose a more circuitous route and go to a farther grocery store just to avoid unsafe roads). We should still stop sprawling and do infill development, but cycling is the secret sauce that can make the garbage land use we already have less car dependent.

My walk/cycle split is pretty indicative of that too. In months where I'm in KW my bike/walk split heavily leans towards bike, while in Wellington there's way less biking and way more walking. KW is much better for biking than for walking, and it's going to be hard to get buses that meet those needs, especially in deep suburbia. Bikes are far more practical for many people.

NZ outside Wellington is pretty car centric too. Although, as in any city, driving a car in central Wellington is not that fun. And the streets are narrow.

[Bytor]

Should also be noted, the Netherlands are roughly 200km by 200km in size (41,000 km2). That's it. And yet you still have 588 cars per 100k. For comparison, Southern Ontario is 114,000 km2, almost 3x the size, with about 4.5 million less people.

Bullshit alert.

Nobody's talking a bout biking across Ontario (or even across the Netherlands) so that size is utterly irrelevant and bad faith arguing to bring up.

It's about biking 1-5km to work inside the same city where you live.

[danbrotherston]

Should also be noted, the Netherlands are roughly 200km by 200km in size (41,000 km2). That's it. And yet you still have 588 cars per 100k. For comparison, Southern Ontario is 114,000 km2, almost 3x the size, with about 4.5 million less people.

Bullshit alert.

Nobody's talking a bout biking across Ontario (or even across the Netherlands) so that size is utterly irrelevant and bad faith arguing to bring up.

It's about biking 1-5km to work inside the same city where you live.

Honestly...it's also silly. From a travel perspective...there are no borders in schengen zone (which is slightly different than the EU).

I'm not sure what jeffster was getting at for the Netherlands in terms of area, it doesn't really affect anything. Most people drive their cars for exactly the same types of long distance trips as they do in Ontario...we aren't on an island...people routinely drive 3 hours to places in Germany or Belgium.

The difference again is that you are not dependent on a car...you can drive to Rheinbach Germany (a random small town in Germany) but I can also take transit pretty easily in a way that is impossible in most of Ontario.

[Bytor]

It's also extremely small. You can walk from one end of Amsterdam to the other in just over an hour.

Do you always just pull stuff out of your butt like that?

More like 3.5 hours.

You do the same thing with you oft-debunked 2 hour bus ride claim.

It is much easier to transform the infrastructure of a city when the city itself is tiny and not even 1 million people live in it.

You mean like Kitchener at 260,000 people an 137km² compared to Amsterdam in the 1980s of 720,000 and 219km²?

Bike usage is high there because the country/cities are tiny, they have fairly mild weather year round and they really could not afford to waste space on roads.

Country size is irrelevant and using it as an argument is bad faith and dishonest because nobody is talking about biking across Canada, across Ontario, or even across the Netherlands. More like between 1 and 10 km to work in the same city.

As for weather, how many time do people have to bring up the Not Just Bikes video about Oulu, Finland, before you stop making that BS claim?

[bravado]

I’m certain that the next generation, when they can’t afford to live or move in the city they grew up in, will probably just understand that the status quo was just too hard to change.

[danbrotherston]

The Toronto Board of Trade gave the region a B- grade on our transit system.

https://bot.com/Resources/Resource-Libra...port-Cards

They fairly reasonably analyze our transit system and correctly point out our strengths and weaknesses (like our LRVs operating too slowly).

I am surprised though that they don't seem to look at intercity transit at all (which did make it easier to know where to post this lol), given that it's the Toronto board of trade, and also intercity transit is by far the region's biggest weakness.

It is nice to see an economic organization focus on transit though...

[Bytor]

I am surprised though that they don't seem to look at intercity transit at all (which did make it easier to know where to post this lol), given that it's the Toronto board of trade, and also intercity transit is by far the region's biggest weakness.

Lack of decent GO bus & train service was mentioned.

[bravado]

https://www.cambridgetoday.ca/local-news...ge-7243367

The region is now offering a new way to get to areas in Cambridge that have been inaccessible by bus. 
The 72 Boxwood flex route is one of three new flexible bus routes being offered by Grand River Transit.
GRT said in a press release these routes provide reliable service in parts of the region that are harder to serve with regular bus routes and help build ridership in lower-density and new growth areas, while connecting transit riders to the wider network.

I’m annoyed that we make new places that are ignored by transit in the first place, but happy to see some options from GRT. As someone who works in an industrial park, the really high volumes of people walking and biking through ditches and gravel shoulders don’t ever come up in these sorts of forums but it’s really a massive chunk of people who need to get to work.