WB62
Senior Member
At Union it’s been 9 and 10.
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- Thread starter drum118
- Start date
reaperexpress
Senior Member
I said that we should run more express services and that local services should use shorter (faster-accelerating) trains so they don't need additional schedule padding. Which part of that did you interpret as "I want slower trains"?
stevensontransit
Active Member
Rode the 25 Waterloo bus to Square One from Cambridge today at around 1:13 pm and the bus is dangerously at capacity. I was still able to board the bus but there are almost no seats left and the service still runs hourly when it should be every half and hour because of many U of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier students heading back to Square One.
tmlittle
Active Member
I've personally noticed issues with the 25 and 30, as well as hearing about it from other people. I talked to a GO employee a month or so ago while riding an at-capacity 30 bus that had to leave passengers behind, who pointed out that extending the 30 to UWaterloo without any other service improvements has been a disaster. Now that more Waterloo students are back, GO needs to bring back the 25 express variants that pulled Waterloo riders off the "milk run" 25 bus and levelled out ridership. Currently it seems buses depart Waterloo basically full, are already almost at capacity once they reach Kitchener and I can't imagine what goes on in Cambridge. It creates an unfair service pattern within the tricities where someone in Cambridge who was maybe trying to make an appointment or reach a connecting service might not be able to get on the bus, or might have a very late bus due to excessive dwell times.
ShonTron
Moderator
I was on a new GO bus two weeks ago, and it has seatbelts. I think the expectation is if the bus seats have seatbelts, you are required to use them. It has been a while since I’ve been on a standing room only GO bus, but they used to be a big problem on some of the midday and evening 31 buses, especially before the limited midday/evening train service was introduced.
Does GO still permit standees?
Does GO still permit standees?
mdu
Active Member
Yeah, I took a 25, after the term was over, at 9pm from Sq1 to the University, on a Sunday, and it was absolutely full. Pretty sure they sent another bus. Anyway, they really need the Thursday/Friday/Sunday express busses back.
rbt
Senior Member
Yes, as observed on Barrie buses.
tmlittle
Active Member
Yeah, I think this is an example of GO not being responsive to the weekend traveller market. With so many Torontonians clearly having permanently moved to the region, there's going to be an surge in weekend trips back. Even if 5am commuter runs are empty, it's not a good situation for ridership if GO fails to take advantage of this demand.
smallspy
Senior Member
There are not enough locos and cab-cars in service today to do this in any meaningful way.
Perhaps once the new locos now on tender start to arrive - and assuming that there are more usable cab cars, in whatever way shape that takes form - then this can be done.
The expresses are due to come back, but I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest that their return is imminent.
There will be off-peak express service eventually, but I'd suggest that it would be best to concentrate on getting the normal service back to where it should be first.
Dan
reaperexpress
Senior Member
Why not? We ran more frequent peak-period service in 2019 than we do today, and peak-hour ridership was much higher. Surely if we ran the same level of peak period service today, we could arrange for some of the local trains to be shorter than they were in 2019, due to the less-pronounced peak period surge.
The problem with boosting local train frequency without ever introducing express service is that GO is simply missing out on part of the market, namely the longer trips. Local trains work fine when you're coming in from Mississauga or Oakville, but needing to sit on a local train all the way from Burlington, Hamilton, St Catharines or Niagara is a huge obstacle to potential ridership. And with increased hybrid home/work setups, we can reasonably expect an increase in long-distance commuting trips compared to the pre-pandemic situation around which the "normal" service was designed. GO should be setting itself up to capture those trips, since it already has the infrastructure to do so.
So rather than returning to the 4 tph local we briefly had at the end of 2021, I would prefer 3 tph local + 1 tph express.
This is the same problem that route 25 is facing: their 2021 service increased the local service from 1 bus per hour to 2, rather than restoring the express service. But this would lose many former 25 Express bus riders (such as myself), for whom the local bus' travel time is already a deal breaker, regardless of how frequent it is.
ShonTron
Moderator
I also get the sense that Metrolinx is just terrible at listening to its customers and customer service/relations. Route 88 is just as borked as the 25 now, when GO restructured that route to take over part of Route 90 through Bowmanville. It might look good on a spreadsheet with passenger loads and cost reductions, but it became intolerably long to get to Peterborough, and with Greyhound gone, no other carrier has yet picked up the Toronto-Peterborough market. There's lots of complaining about Route 25 on Twitter, but you just get the sense that Metrolinx doesn't care.
ShonTron
Moderator
The other thing is that the Route 30 doesn't run weekends. Route 30 really isn't a bad bus connection to Kitchener/Waterloo, because Bramalea will soon be a really easy train/bus transfer, and it runs on a pretty quick route on the 407 and 401 (with only a stop at Meadowvale Business Park, where there's connections to other GO buses as well as Miway and BT), and extending it to U of Waterloo was a smart move. But that should have been an addition to the return of the 25C, not a substitute.
stevensontransit
Active Member
You can tell how irresponsible GO transit is these days.
smallspy
Senior Member
Because there are 65-ish trainsets in service today, with a locomotive roster of 91. That's almost at the limit of the number of units that can be used in service every day - they might be able to manage another 5 units each day. Unlike a bus, there are regulatory restrictions to the operation of locomotives and railcars. The same goes for cab cars although to a lesser degree, and so the spare ratio can be lower - and the refurbished cab cars will help this.
The additional 20 or so locomotives that are projected to be purchased will help ameliorate this.
Is it though?
Ridership has been coming back quite strongly in the off-peak hours when there is no express service. And the off-peak ridership was very, very robust prior to COVID.
Strongly disagree.
The higher the frequencies we make the operation, the more likely that people will view the service like a subway, where one simply just shows up at a station - they don't need to think about a schedule. The less time people spend waiting for the service, the more likely they are to use the service.
The time spent in transit isn't as important because at that point they feel that they are already in motion, and so it isn't felt as "time wasted".
Dan
smallspy
Senior Member
Throwing this out there, but could it also be that it is simply a bit of an echo chamber on Twitter, with the same couple of voices making the complaints?
I know that there is definitely a case currently going on like this in Oakville/Mississauga, to the point where the transit agencies out there have blocked a number of users.
Dan