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Last summer, an inspector got the blunt of my fit when an outdated schedule inside the Dorval station made me think that the 211 bus I wanted to take home was running early. Since I had time to kill while waiting for the next 211 20 minutes later, I was able to compare the schedules inside the station and the one on the bus stop. They were different; they did not bother to update the schedules inside!

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The STM has a shortage of buses. Not because the newfangled buses don’t work well, no, but simply because they did not order enough. And it also has a shortage of bus drivers, too. Not because the bus drivers don’t work well, but simply because they did not hire enough (they’re hiring — and there is supposedly enough “demand” that they have to draw lots to figure out which acceptable applications will go further). In fact, those shortages mean that if 10% more people start to ride the buses (especially in the West-Island), the STM is gonna be in DDD (Deep Doo-Doo).

The government recently announced that they gonna take some measures this fall to help people cope with the “rising price of gas”. Presumably, this would mean that there are going to be public transportation measures.

That’s very fine and well, but you just can’t go and buy buses like that; no one keeps them in stock. In fact, they would be very hard-pressed to buy more than 732 (730 on non leap-years) buses per year because the Novabus can only build 2 buses per day. It’s not that I’m saying that the «acheter Québec» policy oughta be scrapped, but that the measures should not exclusively involve hardware.

Yes, the problem could be solved by software; that is, reprogramming life.

The biggest problem of a public transit operator is the rush-hour. Everyone goes from everywhere to mostly one place (downtown) in the morning, and vice-versa in the evening (well, not all. Myself, I often struggle by living downtown and working in the West-Island. It’s not an easy proposition; last winter, the bus I depended upon was cancelled numerous time, which doubly sucks as it was a rush-only line).

The obvious solution is to stagger the rush hour; spread it along the day.

This can easily be done by FORCING companies to adopt flex-time; that is, employeers should be free to set their schedules at THEIR convenience, in order to stagger the rush. Now, if an employer wants to be free to set it’s employees’ schedule at IT’S convenience, he would have the burden of proving that he could not cope with mandatory flextime (this is to squash little bossy micro-managers who want to control everything their minions do).

Another solultion is to eliminate the commute, with remote working.

That’s what I do; my commute is less than 15 feet. And I don’t even need to dress (yup, I often work naked, and I’m not a sexycam operator). Of course, it won’t be that easy for everyone, again tanks to those little bossy micro-managers who want to control everythign their minions do.

Again, the solution would be for the employer to absolutely prove that having warm bodies at $ORKPLACE is absolutely vital for the well-being of the known universe.

This proves that transportation is a very complex issues that overflows way beyond the sidewalks. And no, this government will never have the balls to take the hard decisions that need to be taken (Imagine! Forcing bosses to accept that they would no longer set their employees’ schedules! Oh! The humanity!!!)

I told him that it’s BS that he wouldn’t even register a complaint. As I’m expressing myself to him, a number of other passengers chimed in with their support and experiences. Let me tell you, the bus driver did NOT want to be there, and probably felt the bullseye on the back of his head.

One passenger even told me that after calling the STM many times, an agent finally told her that the 5:30 route for bus #57 was cut. The problem is that their website still showed it on the schedule, as well as on the posted schedules at the stops.

My call to the STM complaint line finally resulted in them telling me that there were “a few instances” when they were short on funtional buses, so the 5:30 route was cancelled “a few times”. They clearly are cutting corners, chopping out service, despite the promise from Mayor Tremblay that we would have increased accessiblilty to public transportation service.

1. You probably wouldn’t really get THAT much cash back to in meaningful improvements toward the other routes, except maybe an extra bus or two on certain routes. They usually don’t cost that much to operate, and in some cases the bigger routes actually lose more money. There’s a big difference in actual cost between putting out 1 or 2 buses an hour on a lightly travelled route with a couple stops, as opposed to putting 20 or more buses an hour on a heavily used route, with as many more drivers, with X more schedules to be posted in X more bus shelters at X more bus stops, etc. Basically: eliminating the lighter lines is not going to somehow make the network more “profitable.” That’s not the goal, anyway, is it?
2. You eliminate some lines that are essentially feeder routes in the network…a bus line sans transfers doesn’t really cover a lot of area; people aren’t going to walk that far to wait for a bus to take them somewhere. I mean, you start eliminating “unusued” bus routes and the whole network starts to see passengers disappearing (yes, really; for example, when service stops on the green line, the orange line doesn’t suddenly get overwhelmed). Why would they disappear? Don’t people act and react the same way that models of fluid dynamics do? It’s probably because:
3. You essentially are leaving people with no public transit, which means they will find another way to get around. Out on the West Island, odds are they will buy a car, they will drive it, and they will use it for the whole journey (or, are they really supposed to drive to a stop on the 202 and then wait, since the other much closer route has now disappeared?); or at least will find any other means to get around, since they have to. And that is bad, for the public, for road congestion, for the transit agency, for quality of life!

Cutting a line should only happen if they are actually running empty or for some reason costs too much to operate. Rail lines are more prone to this happening (as they are so very expensive to build, maintain, and operate) but this is unlikely for a bus route which has very little capital involved in its infrastructure, save the actual vehicle and driver. The roads are already there and are maintained by somebody else. That’s probably the only advantage to the bus over rail transit.

For more to ponder, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_closures for an extreme example of pursuing this mentality (albeit on a large, national train network instead of a suburban bus network). I think the principles are very similar, no? Yes?

As for stopping to pick up passengers along Côte-Vertu during the evening, that would defeat the purpose of an express bus, no?

Is the idea that you could use the 201 instead? Because the 201 meanders its way up to Fairview either the slow way through pte-claire or in the other direction, through Pierrefonds, etc. The 200 is almost 20 minutes more direct (up st-charles, over hymus, up st-jean). It also helps out with the morning rush-hour load to John Abbott along the lakeshore, which, on the 211 is often so packed, you practically have to sit in the driver’s lap.

If the idea is for people, even in the west island, to use transit instead of cars, cutting nice direct bus routes is not the way to do it.