Good Service Means Successful Transit

Brampton, Ont. has discovered the key to a successful transit system.

Run buses more frequently and provide good service.

Who knew?

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What this place shows, though, is that even in a place without any of the supposed prerequisites, you can still get tens of thousands of people to choose to ride the bus. We don’t have to wait until all our suburbs are rebuilt to become European-style walkable utopias; it’s possible to get people out of their cars in a matter of months simply by running buses more frequently.

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To read this story from Bloomberg CityLab, click here.

What we did in Ottawa is we provided bad unreliable bus and train service and, when that didn’t work and OC Transpo ran up huge deficits, we cut back service through New Ways to Bus. So bad service became appalling service.

Here is something basic to so many things.

Provide a good service that people need and they will buy it.

Provide a bad service that people need and they will find alternatives to the bad service to satisfy their needs.

The alternative to bad transit service in Ottawa is old beater cars. Accordingly, more traffic (hindering bus scheduling) and more pollution. Transit is supposed to be climate-friendly but in Ottawa, it is not.

Then we buy electric buses that will be charged by huge natural-gas generators.

That is politics over reality. We tell people we’re going green with electric buses but in fact they are being charged with natural gas. Where is the climate benefit of that?

Electric buses are more expensive than their diesel counterparts but with less range and worse reliability, particularly in cold climates.

Sheer trickery, bad politics and terrible public policy.

Ken Gray

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