Speed is everywhere in our modern culture. Fast phones, fast food, fast cars. Like it or not, in our culture, fast is good and slow is bad. Even Disney movies push the message that fast wins. Lightning McQueen, the superstar racer in the Cars movies starts every race with the mantra, “I am speed.”
If there’s ever a Guelph Transit bus in a Cars movie, the mantra will be, “I am slow”. Our buses travel slowly, stop too often, get caught in traffic, run loop-based routes, and don’t come often enough. All of this adds up to slow travel times and unattractive transit. Not too many people choose the slow alternative.
Including time at stops and in traffic, some of Guelph’s busiest routes travel at 15 to 20 km per hour. Making transit even less appealing, the above speeds only consider the time spent on the bus. Wait times often add 5 to 10 minutes to travel time, but waits can be much longer when routes only run every 30 minutes, like most Guelph Transit routes.
Wait times matter when considering transit speed. For short trips, people riding transit might spend more time waiting and transferring than they spend on the bus. It doesn’t matter how fast the vehicle travels, if it doesn’t come often, riders are stuck with long travel times.
But it’s not just long wait times that make trips on Guelph Transit so painfully slow. Our buses stop often, on some routes every 100-200 meters. This means people have short walks to stops, but the stops slow travel down dramatically. Once people are on the bus, their trips are often slowed down by windy routes. The fastest routes travel in straight lines, only turning when they need to.
Worst of all, transit is stuck in traffic, along with thousands of cars that are usually each carrying just one person. Buses caught on Gordon Street, narrow bridges or Downtown are certainly not fast. Transit caught in traffic is slow, unreliable, and expensive to operate.
If Guelph is to dramatically increase transit ridership, we will have to provide high-quality, on-street transit service on many important corridors. High-quality transit service is fast, frequent, and reliable. That means fewer routes, running more often - usually 15 minutes or better. It means routes that run in straight lines on major corridors. It means fewer stops and more chances for transit to bypass traffic jams.
The Route Review, the new proposal to improve and expand Guelph Transit’s routes, only provides some of these things. It will improve frequency on some routes, straighten other routes and provide new limited-stop rush-hour service on 1 route. This is all good. The big problem, however, is that there are currently no big plans to massively increase speed for most routes. Stop spacing, as far as we know, will stay the same. There are currently big plans to make high-priority transit corridors, but that is contingent on the Transportation Master Plan and the future Transit Master Plan being approved. So many riders will have shorter waits and better routes, but most of those routes will be the same slow, unreliable service currently offered. Slow and unreliable transit simply won’t attract many new riders.
We have a chance to create fast, frequent, and reliable transit options in Guelph with frequent transit of 15 minutes or better on core routes, with transit priority measures, and with transit only lanes.
- With files from IMTB
