Waterloo Transit Prospers While Transpo Fails
Former city councillor Alex Cullen has noticed some surprising statistics from Grand River Transit in the Waterloo region.
Its ridership is skyrocketing and has exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
This from X:
Interestingly the increase in part can be traced to upward use by post-secondary students.
Now let’s see … in the OC Transpo example.
The Trillium Line is two years late and its biggest customer on that route is … wait for it … Carleton University.
The western Stage 2 line is late and is targeted at being finished in 2017. That said, Transpo targets are moving ones.
And one of the biggest customers along Stage 2? Why Algonquin College.
So the LRT, through its delays, is shooting itself in the foot in one of its most active ridership areas … post-secondary students. Then, of course, there’s the overall unreliability of the line. Not an encouragement for transit users.
It might be valuable for a person or two from OC Transpo to visit the bright lights of Kitchener-Waterloo to discover what those people are doing right.
Ken Gray
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Again and again Ottawa has to reinvent the wheel. Not good enough for a “world class city” to simply improve on an existing operation or adapt/adopt one like Calgary or Waterloo. Ottawa has to experiment with taxpayers money and fail miserably with PLASCO, Green garbage, LRT, Landsdowne, Libraries and so on all the while increasing property taxes and diminishing values! Where did good governance go? Out the door with career politicians running Ottawa instead of good solid businessmen, pillars of the community.
OC Transpo receives cash from the mandatory UPasses built in to the tuition and related dues, irrespective of whether OC Transpo provide useful services to the students who are forced to pay these fares. Some might argue that this could be construed as receiving cash under wrongful pretenses, which is just a lot of syllables for fraud. Of course that never applies to government. They have exempted themselves from such inconveniences.
Ron,
I’m very surprised that there haven’t been calls for referenda on the various post-secondary campuses asking to either reduce the price of the U-Pass or abolish it altogether. When the O-Train is down or the bus consistently comes late, a student doesn’t have the option of not buying next month’s pass. They re locked in to the U-Pass regardless.
Other passengers have the option of abandoning OC Transpo and using other modes of transport such as cars, bikes or their legs. Whether they use it or not, the students pay for the U-Pass and it is collected as part of their tuition bill along with other student services. So if you live on campus and walk to class and other activities, you pay, If you live in Fitzroy Harbour or Marionville where there is no bus service, you pay.
Students are often on low incomes and, in some cases, are borrowing the money the university is collecting from them. Why would you continue to rack up student loan debt for a service that wasn’t available to use?
The same applies to students living south of the Carleton campus who are still waiting for the Trillium Line and its extension. They know now that the train won’t be running until some point after next September.
Maybe they could organize a class action suit against OC Transpo to get a refund of the fees collected by the schools on OC’s behalf.
Voter, it is my understanding that a referendum (of sorts) re the U-Pass was held by the UOttawa students association a couple of years ago. The U-Pass remains in place.
Earlier this week I drove by Carleton U, mid-day. The parking lots visible from Bronson were full. Full of cars because OC Transpo service to a campus with multiple thousands of customers have chosen to bear the incremental costs of fuel and parking. Why?
Our niece stayed with us while she attended Carleton’s School of Architecture. To get to Carleton from Stately Centrepointe, she had to take two buses, the O-Train, then another bus (a ~500 metre walk from Bayview Station to the bus stop). Typical trip time, door to door: 75-90 minutes (variability being bus transfer time). When, after a late afternoon or evening class, she arrived at Baseline Station after 7 pm, we would drive over and pick her up, rather than have her walk the more than kilometre through the park in the dark. Why? Because OC Transpo cuts the local service through Stately Centrepointe back to hourly, until it just doesn’t run (not sure when last call is).
For her last year, our niece arrived at our house with a car. Typical trip time, door to door: 25-30 minutes (with a bit under 10 minutes being the walk from the parking lot to the Architecture building). Her monthly parking pass for the most distant lot on campus was over $100. Her time was worth something to her.
As for OC Transpo, the cynic in me says that they treat the money they get from U-Pass cards as “free”. Free, as in no need to provide anything remotely close to acceptable service to the campuses that provide tens of thousands of potential customers and millions of dollars of cash.