[LNahid2000]

• Starting April 27, GO Bus Route 21 from Milton will return to the Union Station Bus Terminal.

This is the only part that's new to me.

 

[Allandale25]

This morning's announcement is indeed the April 28 service improvements of which we were previously aware.

Press Release here:

Ontario Newsroom

news.ontario.ca

From the above:

The last paragraph may foreshadow something else:

View attachment 556386

Look forward to the seeing the annual end of year chart by @reaperexpress that includes this and I guess any other changes that happened the rest of the year.

 

[crs1026]

Back pre-covid, the addition of seat-miles of service was a metric that ML put a lot of emphasis on.... I wondered if it was even in some execs' bonus scorecards. It had some silly consequences ie the addition of late-night equipment moves as regularly scheduled trains..... few passengers but plenty of seat-miles added.

I wonder if that metric is still tracked. Certainly, these improvements will add a lot of seat-miles to the plan.

- Paul

 

[smallspy]

Back pre-covid, the addition of seat-miles of service was a metric that ML put a lot of emphasis on.... I wondered if it was even in some execs' bonus scorecards. It had some silly consequences ie the addition of late-night equipment moves as regularly scheduled trains..... few passengers but plenty of seat-miles added.

I wonder if that metric is still tracked. Certainly, these improvements will add a lot of seat-miles to the plan.

- Paul

The metric being focused on then and now was not seat-miles, but revenue trains, and specifically trains/day and trains/week. Each one of those deadheads that were converted to revenue runs counted as 7 trains/week.

It's such an important metric that there needs to be a specific number of revenue trains/week - higher than is currently being run, and still higher than will be run after April 28th - upon the handover to OnExpress on January 1st.

Dan

 

[innsertnamehere]

by January 1st you mean 2025?

 

[ShonTron]

• Starting April 27, GO Bus Route 21 from Milton will return to the Union Station Bus Terminal.

This is the only part that's new to me.

With the Gardiner down to two lanes by the CNE grounds for the next three years, I’m not sure if this was a good idea.

Edit: there's a new Route 22 between Milton and Oakville, weekdays only, with a limited schedule.

https://assets.metrolinx.com/image/upload/v1713166655/Documents/GO/full-schedules/FS27042024/TABLE22.pdf

 

[T3G]

Edit: there's a new Route 22 between Milton and Oakville, weekdays only, with a limited schedule.

Ah, so on weekends, which is exactly the time when you'd most want to avoid the Gardiner and take the train instead, there's nothing. And I'm sure there's not going to be any confusion caused by the fact that the service that was provided by the 21 will now be provided by the 22, and people won't get on the wrong bus because they expect a 21...

The schedule for the 22 is also appallingly bad. 2 hour frequencies even during evening rush hour? That is worse than even the old route 20 schedule.

How does Metrolinx manage so consistently to get it so completely wrong all the time? Can we disband them and get literally anyone else to run GO? Please? Thank Christ I'm moving out of the province this year, with friends like Metrolinx, who needs enemies?

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

good. about time.

• Starting April 27, GO Bus Route 21 from Milton will return to the Union Station Bus Terminal.

This is the only part that's new to me.

yes!!! no more lakeshore trips doubling travel time.

 

[T3G]

good. about time.

yes!!! no more lakeshore trips doubling travel time.

How exactly did the Lakeshore trips double the travel time? I think you're needlessly romanticizing the old 21 schedule.

On paper, it should be 1 hour 35 by 21A + LW, vs anywhere from 1 hr 10 to 1 hr 35, depending on the exact trip, according to the last pre-covid schedule (link). Any traffic would have made this number go up, especially on the Gardiner, so you'd be lucky if you just about broke even.

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

How exactly did the Lakeshore trips double the travel time? I think you're needlessly romanticizing the old 21 schedule.

On paper, it should be 1 hour 35 by 21A + LW, vs anywhere from 1 hr 10 to 1 hr 35, depending on the exact trip, according to the last pre-covid schedule (link). Any traffic would have made this number go up, especially on the Gardiner, so you'd be lucky if you just about broke even.

Fair enough. It was just going to Port Credit and transfer that I was against. Residents of Milton should be able to get downtown with ease.

 

[T3G]

I agree that residents of Milton should be able to get downtown with ease, but as someone who uses the route on a quasi-regular basis, I have found the current arrangement, mostly, to be more convenient.

It took some doing. When they first rerouted the 21 to Oakville, there was no midday service along Derry Road and it took them eons to wake up and run all the 27s to Milton, but now that all of them do so, it is a marked improvement. The biggest problems with the current 21 in Oakville is that it doesn't run during rush hours (which is a complete joke), and that it runs every hour for most of the day (30 minutes would be much better). Transferring in Oakville was fine, there's normally a train along within 10 minutes or so, but the reverse direction is brutal, sometimes you could be stuck waiting an hour for the next bus. So of course, instead of working at these issues, Metrolinx are reverting the changes and throwing us into Gardiner traffic.

If you gave custody of transit in Ontario to a bunch of strung out crackheads, I doubt very much they'd do any worse than ML does.

 

[ShonTron]

I agree that residents of Milton should be able to get downtown with ease, but as someone who uses the route on a quasi-regular basis, I have found the current arrangement, mostly, to be more convenient.

It took some doing. When they first rerouted the 21 to Oakville, there was no midday service along Derry Road and it took them eons to wake up and run all the 27s to Milton, but now that all of them do so, it is a marked improvement. The biggest problems with the current 21 in Oakville is that it doesn't run during rush hours (which is a complete joke), and that it runs every hour for most of the day (30 minutes would be much better). Transferring in Oakville was fine, there's normally a train along within 10 minutes or so, but the reverse direction is brutal, sometimes you could be stuck waiting an hour for the next bus. So of course, instead of working at these issues, Metrolinx are reverting the changes and throwing us into Gardiner traffic.

If you gave custody of transit in Ontario to a bunch of strung out crackheads, I doubt very much they'd do any worse than ML does.

I took that Route 21 between Milton and Oakville a few times. The transfer to the Highway 407 bus services at Trafalgar Road Park & Ride was a busy stop. The new schedule doesn't help with that.

 

[IRT_BMT_IND]

I used the 21 between Mississauga and Toronto frequently about 13 years ago, and even then it was very unreliable certain times (Saturday afternoons especially) due to heavy traffic in Mississauga and on the QEW/Gardiner. It must be substantially worse now. The new 21 schedule has lots of weird non-clockface headways, and the runtime between Square One and USBT varies from ~40 minutes to over an hour for different trips. Probably Metrolinx is using software like Hastus to "optimize" run times based on the typical traffic levels for specific times of the day. A lot of the Square One - USBT trips probably probably aren't time competitive vs. the Miway 109 to Kipling, especially if your final destination isn't near Union station,

The actual solution needs to be a service that doesn't get stuck in traffic. Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

 

[Achemarci]

I agree that residents of Milton should be able to get downtown with ease, but as someone who uses the route on a quasi-regular basis, I have found the current arrangement, mostly, to be more convenient.

It took some doing. When they first rerouted the 21 to Oakville, there was no midday service along Derry Road and it took them eons to wake up and run all the 27s to Milton, but now that all of them do so, it is a marked improvement. The biggest problems with the current 21 in Oakville is that it doesn't run during rush hours (which is a complete joke), and that it runs every hour for most of the day (30 minutes would be much better). Transferring in Oakville was fine, there's normally a train along within 10 minutes or so, but the reverse direction is brutal, sometimes you could be stuck waiting an hour for the next bus. So of course, instead of working at these issues, Metrolinx are reverting the changes and throwing us into Gardiner traffic.

If you gave custody of transit in Ontario to a bunch of strung out crackheads, I doubt very much they'd do any worse than ML does.

Actually the new 27 schedule just removed half of the recent gains... there is now only 1 round trip on weekends to Milton and it stops at Meadowvale after 8pm on weekdays. I really would like them to just move to the 407. During rush hour, the 27 sometimes goes all the way up to the 407/400 interchange to avoid 401 traffic. It's so annoying it can't stop at Highway 407 station when it's right there! I think the route would be far more competitive if it went on the 407 and stopped at Highway 407 subway and Finch instead of Yorkdale and Finch. Meadowvale already has this with Route 48, but Milton doesn't

 

[reaperexpress]

Great to see the improvements as expected. Indeed the 21 direct to Union is the only surprise, though I don't think we were confident that the skip-stop Union Pearson Express would be happening this month.

The timing of the Route 30 buses with the new Bramalea trains seems like a missed opportunity. The 30 is the single largest connecting route for Kitchener trains, with nearly a full double-decker bus load transferring to each Kitchener train. There are often two buses per hour (especially on Thurs/Fri), but rather than having one bus for each of the two trains per hour at Bramalea, they often have two Route 30 buses connecting to one train and no Route 30 bus connecting to the other. That seems like a recipe for terrible passenger distribution between the Bramalea trains and the Mount Pleasant/Kitchener trains, with the former being far less busy than the latter. And of course it means that the effective headway from Toronto to Kitchener is only hourly even though they're often running multiple buses and trains per hour.

For example:
There are two buses connecting to the 11:08 arrival at Bramalea on Fridays, but none connecting to the 11:40 arrival.
There are two buses connecting to the 13:09 arrival at Bramalea (which continues to Kitchener anyway) but none connecting to the 13:40 arrival (that terminates at Bramalea)
There are two buses connecting to the 15:09 arrival at Bramalea but none connecting to the 15:40 arrival.

It's also interesting to note that the new trains that turn back at Bramalea skip Etobicoke North. Again that's something I would swap, surely it should be the trains starting at Bramalea that serve a local stop like Etobicoke North rather than the trains coming all the way from Mount Pleasant or Kitchener. They haven't put any time savings in the schedule for the trains skipping Etobicoke North but in practice it should at least make them more reliable by increasing the padding relative to the schedule.

I agree that residents of Milton should be able to get downtown with ease, but as someone who uses the route on a quasi-regular basis, I have found the current arrangement, mostly, to be more convenient.

It took some doing. When they first rerouted the 21 to Oakville, there was no midday service along Derry Road and it took them eons to wake up and run all the 27s to Milton, but now that all of them do so, it is a marked improvement. The biggest problems with the current 21 in Oakville is that it doesn't run during rush hours (which is a complete joke), and that it runs every hour for most of the day (30 minutes would be much better). Transferring in Oakville was fine, there's normally a train along within 10 minutes or so, but the reverse direction is brutal, sometimes you could be stuck waiting an hour for the next bus. So of course, instead of working at these issues, Metrolinx are reverting the changes and throwing us into Gardiner traffic.

If you gave custody of transit in Ontario to a bunch of strung out crackheads, I doubt very much they'd do any worse than ML does.

I think it is very unlikely that the decision to revert back to direct buses to Union came from within Mx. I suspect that the province forced them to do that in response to people complaining about losing their one-seat ride.