Susan Lewis re Agenda Item 3
With about 300 people upset enough to complain to the City, there’s obviously a huge problem occurring in the here and now. To address it sometime in the future while allowing all these problems to fester is only going to add to the growing frustration so many people are experiencing.
For the first time, I have heard 2 people talk about selling their homes and moving out of Burlington. They have lost confidence that eventually Burlington will have a workable transit system. If that happens, statistically each house, now occupied by one senior, would be bought by a family with 1.7 cars, thus adding to the road congestion.
Bus Signage:
Tourists, visitors and new transit users are finding the bus signs very confusing. We used to have a “Brant North” bus that traveled up the whole of Brant Street from the terminal to Cavendish Drive. Going in the other direction, it was then called the “Brant South”. It was simple and easily understood. Now, we only have a “Brant North” bus. I’ve had to assure people that even though the bus says “North” it is actually going south, on the return trip. (They think it might veer off and go north again.)
Bus Schedule:
The schedule was very simple and now it has become quite complicated. For my bus, the #2, all I needed to know was my bus left the stop that used to be “Autumn Hill & Driftwood” but is now renamed “Guelph Line & Coventry Lane” every half hour at :24 and :54. During rush hour, we used to have 15 minute service in the middle of the half hour. (:39 and :09) Now, the 15 minute and half hour service is gone and it’s every 12 to 26 minutes during rush hour. It is actually every 20 minutes between 10:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
If a person wants to continue south along Brant from the Burlington GO Station, they need to be on the #3 “Guelph Downtown” bus or the #5 Francis Downtown bus. So, when you get to the GO Station, you may or may not have to change buses. Sometimes the “Brant North” becomes the “Guelph Downtown” and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not written in the bus schedule so you’re told to ask the driver. Twice I have asked a driver if they become the #3 and they said they didn’t know because they were going off shift at the Go Station. The same problems exist for the #3 “Guelph Downtown” as well.
It used to be easy to get home from the downtown. All the buses left the Downtown Terminal on the hour and the half hour. During rush hour, they ran every 15 minutes. I could get home using the #2 North or the #3. Now, various buses come and go at different times making transferring difficult. I used to prefer to shop downtown and I used to come downtown every Wednesday but I don’t do that anymore because I haven’t figured out the best way to get home at different times of the day. Traveling and shopping is now easier if I can avoid going south of the Burlington GO Station. Too often I have to sit on a bus at B GO for 15 minutes or so making what was a half hour trip into a three quarters of an hour trip and I may or may not have to transfer buses.
Before November 3rd, the #2/#3 bus ran in a circle all day. I could take the 2 North and it would become the 3 South at Coventry and Guelph Line and then continue along Guelph Line. Now, it might and it might not. As far as I can tell, most of the time it doesn’t.
Suggestion:
I would like to suggest that you start untangling this by restoring at least the #2/#3 back to its original route of a complete circle for most of the day while keeping the part of the schedule that services the 407 Carpool during rush hour. I am concerned that if the City “collects more data” and then realizes that they’re going to have to fix their mistake by putting more money into transit, it will be too late to do anything because the budget will have been passed. If that happens, we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 before we can address it. If there are not enough buses to go around presently, maybe you could rent one from Hamilton to see us through.
I do think we all agree the November 3rd problem will be fixed it’s just a matter of when. I would say that in this case, with so many complaints, timing is everything.
Closing:
I’ve also heard it said that some buses run around the City half empty. I see the bus as half full which means that many more cars are off the road. A bus takes up 2 car spaces of road in traffic and doesn’t require a prime parking space. If that bus is half empty, or carrying 20 people, that’s 20 cars not adding to the traffic jam. That’s a success story. Even if the bus only has 4 or 5 people on it during part of its trip, that still less traffic.
I wouldn’t ask anyone here to get on a bus themselves but I would respectfully request that you just get a bus schedule and look for yourself as to how you would get from your house to work and then back home each day. You would then see the new schedule and our bus system from a tourist’s or a new user’s point of view.
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