I believe busPLUS route 73 serves the former southbound iXpress stop at Northfield, as does the 19B (although I don't recall seeing it on the stop marker). 19A's schedule makes the bold claim that its stop 200 m down the road also counts as an ION transfer point.
The university is currently constructing yet another engineering building in the vicinity of the future station. Hopefully work can begin soon after said building is complete.
I agree that the total lack of bus connections to Laurier-Waterloo Park is absurd (my commute could certainly benefit from some), but any detour from University onto Seagram would bypass the extremely busy University / Philip intersection.
They are? I thought E8 was postponed indefinitely until funding could be secured. It's absurd that they haven't built the UW bus terminal yet, that was supposed to be open 2 years ago. It also frustrates me that they haven't built a bus terminal at Laurier either, there's nothing but a parking lot there, it's perfectly suited for one!
73 and the 19B do "technically" stop at the station, but trying to cross Northfield to a waiting bus is a disaster waiting to happen. They should have constructed a loop or rerouted bus routes to Parkside via a new bus only road around the new MNP building. No one is ever going to transfer from the 19B to northfield, which is a shame because it would save a bunch of people a lot of time. If they did build a terminal at Northfield (see the crappy sketch below), They wouldn't have to run the 9 and 14 to Conestoga Mall, and could potentially run new routes (such as a Westmount express, a separate route to St Jacobs, a better Northlake bus, or a bus serving the new developments near the YMCA). Conestoga Mall will be more crowded in the future as they increase service on the 201 and 202, and eventually have to rebuild platforms to fit articulated buses, so shifting some routes over to a terminal here would honestly do wonders and keep the mall off of GRT's tail.
They'd only have to expropriate a few parking spaces, and there's plenty of room to work with there.
Central Station is (rightly or wrongly) intended to be an intercity terminal for VIA, GO, and Greyhound. GRT buses will continue to use the stops on the street upon the completion of the transit hub.
The current bus bay can only accommodate two forty foot buses without blocking the crosswalk. We'll see where they take things when our first articulated buses arrive.
I'm curious as to why you think this. For the first time since GRT's infancy, 12's have been arriving at Fairway Station on-time with sufficient connection time.
That would honestly be a huge mistake, Downtown isn't particularly the safest part of the city, and not having a sheltered space for people to use the restroom, get food, wait for their transfers, get help, allow GRT to perform crew changes, and most importantly, connect easily and conveniently with iON would just force people to stop using GRT altogether. No one wants to have to wait for the 1 for 30 minutes outside in the rain or snow, and many people want to have a central location to transfer because downtown is a confusing mess.
Articulated buses are going to screw with GRT so much, and as much as I want them to be integrated into our network, GRT just doesn't have the infrastructure to support them. Hopefully they figure things out and make fixes to existing stops and bays before they enter service.
I have a bunch of friends who use the Westmount corridor, they would take the buses from WCI to their homes and now take it from UW to their homes. There are always huge surges of students that need to get on these buses. Westmount used to have both the 8 and 12 running at 15 minute peak frequencies down that road and buses were still overcrowded. The new schedules remove about half of the service. It may not be an issue now since St Davids, WCI, and SJAM have concluded classes and with UW/Laurier are on the spring term, however, come the fall, if they don't increase frequencies, we're likely going to see massive overcrowding on the 12.
I think the reason the 12 is much more predictable now is the fact that it no longer has to do its silly run through the Lincoln neighborhoods, stop at conestoga mall, and have so many convoluted short turns. The 12 split was one of the best things they did in this service update, but they're not integrating the 12/29 with iON and they're not accounting for all service lost. Hopefully they address concerns in the fall service update.