05-28-2021, 02:52 PM
(05-27-2021, 02:31 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Yeah, getting people onto transit early makes sense as well. But there's also a risk of it appearing to be the stop gap you use until you can get a car.
Regardless, I'm totally in agreement that the proposed system is pretty poor. The biggest problem remains the fact that driving is massively subsidized...you are unlikely to be able to beat the driving subsidy just by making transit cheaper. If we mandated that parking cost money for example, the travelwise subsidy would be less important.
It can be a stop-gap for people, but if it makes them comfortable for using it, they'll use it again. I used Kitchener Transit all through high school (that just aged me), then again for my first FT job, when I worked for the Feds, and the bus dropped me off right in front of my house. Then again when the wife and I shared a car. She'd drop me off at work, go to her work after I was done, then pick her up later on (we had a 4 hour separation of work hours, and I couldn't take the bus as it doesn't run before 6 am).
If you start cutting people off of transit due to costs (no how petty the leaders think it is), people start looking at the pro-vs-cons of costs vs convenience, then you lose that ridership.
I can't help to think that our "leaders" are pre-occupied with costs of the GRT, and they have changed some routes, reducing services, like Sunday service, earlier and later service, and cutting route length. 5 years ago, I could have taken the bus to work, and back home, every day, all within a couple hundred meters of my house (actually, more like 20 meters..but). Now at best, I can walk almost a KM, and with my shifts, I can only use the bus for 6 out of 20 shifts.
I'm not going to lie. I love having a car, I love the convenience, how fast it is to get where you need to go, etc. Apart from my family, especially my daughter who cannot use the bus services due to PTSD (bad shit happened on the transit), I couldn't use the bus anyway, if I wanted to. And they keep making changes, and as far as I can see, these are not improvements, it's either cost saving measures, or increased rates, in this case.