Grand River Transit

[BuildingScout]

What I imagine we're seeing here is that yes, the towers of King St are making significant changes to travel patterns. My guess is that students are still gravitating to the most reliable service, the iXpress, but inbound in the morning, they wait at the iXpress stop and take whichever bus comes first.  In the evening, they all go to the iXpress stop, crush load it (because there fewer alternate services at DC) and then all pile out at Laurier to go home to the towers.

The service will not be popular. But it will provide some basic service to a part of the city that's been isolated from transit.

I agree that the towers had reduced the length of the trips, thus the emptier buses in Charles St. terminal, however it still would make much less of a difference in terms of number of passengers carried. Anyone attending UW and living on King is likely to take the bus to school.

Route 15 is an example of an area built for cars, and it is simply not dense enough to justify regular bus service.

[Markster]

I agree that the towers had reduced the length of the trips, thus the emptier buses in Charles St. terminal, however it still would make much less of a difference in terms of number of passengers carried. Anyone attending UW and living on King is likely to take the bus to school.

Aha, but there are people who live in the towers that don't go to UW. They go to Laurier. And my anecdotal view is that it's the Laurier students who have been more likely to live Downtown. All of those Laurier students are no longer taking a bus twice a day. Also, there have been towers opening up adjacent to UW as well.

[MidTowner]

Route 15 is an example of an area built for cars, and it is simply not dense enough to justify regular bus service.

Dead right. And I would say that those buses should be allocated to a part of the region where they will serve actual riders, and serve to attract more of them.

[Pheidippides]

With the university district housing developments, I suspect there's some reverse trends for student ridership that might counterbalance student population increases.

I wouldn't put too much stock in the figure, though.

I actually noticed that students tend to ride the 92 or any of the uni buses now that they are very frequent, rather than walking home as one was forced to do back in the day of buses that went by every 40 minutes off-peak and stopped in every corner, even to Northdale/Columbia.

Speaking of the 92 I didn't see that in the posted materials, especially related to the changes to the 7. Is this seasonal experiment over? Will it continue as is, or become a full year route?

[mpd618]

Speaking of the 92 I didn't see that in the posted materials, especially related to the changes to the 7. Is this seasonal experiment over? Will it continue as is, or become a full year route?

That's a good question to ask at the consultations.

[Markster]

The 92 has graduated into a regular service.
You can pick up a paper schedule for it; it says "year round schedule" just like any other bus. The pilot period was last spring, and the fact that it came back at all this fall says everything.

[mpd618]

The 92 has graduated into a regular service.
You can pick up a paper schedule for it; it says "year round schedule" just like any other bus.  The pilot period was last spring, and the fact that it came back at all this fall says everything.

Thanks! I hadn't caught that - assumed that it came back, but as a Fall/Winter only service.

[Waterlooer]

I've been looking through the old GRT bus schedules and came across the 2006 iXpress one (can be found here). I just find it interesting how far we've come in the past few years... midday service was every 30 minutes :o Today it's every 10 minutes and even then there's no room on the bus sometimes. The next few years will be even more exciting for GRT as the ION gets going.

[timio]

I remember riding it around that time and thought it to be a really neat option, after only being used to the 7 or 8 on their 30 minute schedules to get anywhere, or 8's 45 / 60 minute schedule on weekends. Here's hoping things keep improving.

[Markster]

The main thing I remember about the iXpress in 2006 was that I was pissed that it didn't start the previous year, when I lived just south of King/Union.

[BuildingScout]

I've been looking through the old GRT bus schedules and came across the 2006 iXpress one (can be found here). I just find it interesting how far we've come in the past few years... midday service was every 30 minutes :o Today it's every 10 minutes and even then there's no room on the bus sometimes. The next few years will be even more exciting for GRT as the ION gets going.

Those 30 minutes were an improvement. I recall that if back in the day a long time ago if I missed the non-rush hour number 7 bus to university the next one was 40 or 50 minutes out (there were other #7s in between, but not to University). The end result is that I almost always walked to school which took about 25 minutes.

[nms]

I've been looking through the old GRT bus schedules...

I think it would be neat to see where some of the former local transit routes went.  As the urban fabric evolved (housing, offices, commercial, factories built or torn down), how did service change? If you look carefully around town, you can sometimes see an abandoned concrete or asphalt pad where a bus stop used to be.

Does anyone have a feel for how transit (trolley and bus) evolved? What was the peak density of coverage?  I would be interested to see how GRT's goal of getting every resident within X00m of a transit stop compares to historical service levels.

Are there any history-minded, transit advocates who are handy with mapping tools who would be interested?

[plam]

I've been looking through the old GRT bus schedules...

I think it would be neat to see where some of the former local transit routes went.  As the urban fabric evolved (housing, offices, commercial, factories built or torn down), how did service change? If you look carefully around town, you can sometimes see an abandoned concrete or asphalt pad where a bus stop used to be.

Does anyone have a feel for how transit (trolley and bus) evolved? What was the peak density of coverage?  I would be interested to see how GRT's goal of getting every resident within X00m of a transit stop compares to historical service levels.

Are there any history-minded, transit advocates who are handy with mapping tools who would be interested?

I don't got that for GRT, but I have encountered this for Montreal:

http://www.cat-bus.com/2013/03/explore-t...ars-apart/

He also has walksheds for Montreal compared with transit stops:

http://www.cat-bus.com/2013/04/walksheds...-stations/

One thing I've noticed is that in Montreal, there are still bus lines running which used to be trolley lines 100 years ago, or buses that are still buses 100 years later (for instance, the 85 near my parents' house).

I'm sure that if we threw a couple thousand dollars and source info at Anton, we could get him to do something like that for GRT (or if we somehow otherwise interested him; but he lives in Montreal, not KW, so it might be less interesting for him).

[clasher]

Ontario’s Grand River Valley Electric Railways by John Mills has a chapter about the history of the Belin & Waterloo Street Railway, a precursor to the system that eventually became the trolley buses and Kitchener Transit. There are maps showing the extent of the streetcar lines running from what is now Rockway Seniors Centre on King in Kitchener to uptown Waterloo. There's another line running out to Bridgeport that was apparently converted to buses in 1940. The rest of the streetcar line was switched to trolley buses after the war and they extended that service to King & University it looks like. The book is on file at the KPL

[panamaniac]

I think I recall reading once that you could take the streetcar to the Rockway terminal and from there catch a train that could take you all the way to Port Dover.