Grand River Transit

[chutten]

Given that Ion is supposed to allow for "the redeployment of 19 buses and 50,000 service hours annually" where would you allocate those resources?

Go.

One bus each dedicated to personal shuttles for the top 19 posters on WRC's transit threads?

After that flippant response I was actually going to pull up some population density information and use that to provide a thoughtful answer... but finding population density information for the region seems next-to-impossible. I've found these maps that are coloured by planning district, but they aren't dated despite their methodology otherwise being decently spelled out. I'm guessing their 'current' data is from 2006.

Statscan only publishes based on electoral district. There might be raw data down to the postal code, but that'd require some serious analysis and GIS fiddling to change into something useful.

Decent analogs using the width and location of roads exist and are tempting... but one needs only to look a King St versus Fischer-Hallman to see how that could go completely wrong.

What would be nice is a map overlay using the regional property tax roll information and assumed occupancy/employment numbers as per the above linked report. Heat map that sucker, and we could have a winner.

So, for now, let me just allocate my 19 buses and 50 kilohours (running the numbers, looks like 8 hours per bus per day) to existing routes. Which ones? Let's go with the iXpress routes since the buses are already branded as such. There are currently (Monday, midday-ish, Winter schedule) the following bus allocations (according to the finally-released real-time vehicle position data )

Code:

200 19
201 6
202 6
203 2
204 6

(So that's where the 19 are coming from.)

We are only one bus short of doubling the frequency on every iXpress route. 15min down to 7.5 on 201,202,204. 30min down to 15 on 203 (30min? Wow, that's atrocious).

So my vote is for doing that.