Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

Effectively yes. It was sustained on a core (and largely unchanging) group of volunteers, who a decade ago were young and didn't have a lot of obligations. Now people have families, careers, etc, but we were never successful enough in bringing in new people.

There is currently some discussion about what could be done to revive it, had our first meeting in years last week. But it's still not clear if there's enough people with the time.

This sort of gives you the answer on why transit sucks so bad in this region. People have family. People have careers. Transit can't be part of that because how badly mismanaged it is. It's run by a bunch of clowns.

My son couldn't finish his high school because the GRT cancelled routes due to road construction (affected him for 2 years). The walk was 3,196 meters, just 4 meters short of eligibility of 3.2 km and it is a hard cutoff with STSWR.

Recently, my car broke down (long story short, the last oil change I had, dealership put too much oil in, being this car is a Plug-In Hybrid, I hadn't used the engine until a longer trip that I took), and realized quickly that a bus was not an option - involving about 30 minutes of walk, and 60 minutes of bus, for a relatively short distance. So I took my kids scooter. Also took the scooter to the dealership, as that was going to be a 2 hour affair, but took 20 minutes on the scooter.

Years ago, when transit was more centralized, most trips could be done within 60 minutes or so. Now it's disorganized and takes a lot long longer, making it useless for day-to-day life.

I mean, GRT definitely has it's problems, but I think it's worth pointing out that our bad land use planning makes it very difficult and very expensive to run effective transit.

Always important to remember that these are linked.

And as it's me, I'll always reiterate, cycling (or scooters, skateboards, or whatever your favourite micromobility tool is) is the last mile solution that will save our suburbs...if only we choose to make our roads safe for cycling.

But I really do wonder why GRT was completely unable to manage a reasonable detour for the route, I know there are reasonable detours for Stirling/Greenbrook except for through Lakeside/Meinzinger parks. If there was no feasible detour for that, then region should have facilitated transit access through that area during their construction. This is the whole value of having our transit agency integrated with the regional gov instead of running it as a separate commission, and honestly I almost never see them capitalize on this.