ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

I completely agree that frequency is key, but I don't think that smaller buses help that much, it would be nice to have a specific number on operating costs, but given that driver and maintenance will be about the same, and fuel will be a large fraction of a full size bus, I cannot imagine the savings is much, and the operation cost of having to manage a fleet with more than one type of bus isn't free either, it could literally come out negative.

GRT currently already runs a mixed fleet of New Flyer and Nova buses. And the BusPlus fleet has Chevrolet, Ford and GMC chassis with five (!) different coach bodies and three different engines. So, I don't think adding four Grande West buses to the fleet will have that big an impact.

The fuel economy is likely about 20% better -- and the buses will also be less expensive than full-sized ones. I do assume that they are capable of doing a financial analysis on this.

There is an operational complexity as well...right now any bus can go run any route, you only need one type of hot standby, if you start running smaller buses on some routes at some times, the operational complexity increases. They had this challenge with iXpress (and actually also ION BRT buses), and its why ixpress buses started getting run on other routes.

I am sure they are doing a cost analysis, but I'm saying the improvement is probably not much, if fuel economy is 20% better, and the buses were half as much, it's still possible we're saying less than 10% of the cost of those routes.

I often hear of smaller buses (sometimes even vans or cars) being a magic bullet for better transit, and in general, I don't think that's the case. Frequency is absolutely important, but I suspect most routes which are seeing smaller buses are not seeing a high frequency...transit agencies like ours are barely willing to prioritize frequency over cost on heavily used routes.