What - and where - is this?
UPDATE (April 27): John is the first to get this right below: This is the inside of what used to be a bus shelter on Pie-IX Blvd., specifically the one at Jarry St.
I didn't know it when I posted this question, but it's actually somewhat of a trick one. You see, the objects in this photograph aren't there anymore.
Back to transit this week, on a suggestion from reader Zain Farookhi:
What bus stop is shared between the most bus lines?
(Note that for the purposes of this question, a terminal with multiple stops is not considered one stop.)
UPDATE: Steve Hatton is the first to get the right answer.
STM bus stop at René-Lévesque and Mansfield (westbound)
This stop at René-Lévesque Blvd. and Mansfield (that's the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in the background) has 10 bus lines serving it as of March 29:
Of those 10 routes, two are less than a month old and two others are less than two years old. Before last week, the answer would have been (unless I'm mistaken) the stop at Brunswick Blvd. and St. John's Blvd. outside the Fairview mall in the West Island, which is served by nine routes all coming out of the terminal.
Kellergraham points out an alternative that also has 10 routes serving it.
It's hard to believe, but there are people out there who are more nerdy about public transit than I am.
Take the folks at Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM). They don't just do this as a hobby, chasing after buses with their cameras. They actually study public transit, and their work has results.
When the STM decided it would make a lot of sense to setup a limited-stop express line on St. Michel Blvd., it partnered with TRAM to perform some serious analysis of the plan.
TRAM first used data about existing passengers on the 67 line to estimate time savings in this rather academic-looking document (PDF), even providing different scenarios of where the 467 should stop for maximum efficiency.
After the 467 was put into service, they went back and looked at the average run times for both the 67 and 467 after implementation, and asked passengers to fill out a survey (PDF).
In October, Masters student Julien Surprenant-Legault produced this report (PDF) on the before-and-after numbers.
He explains:
I became involved after the 467 service's implementation on March 30, 2009. [Professor] Ahmed El-Geneidy and I evaluated the accuracy of the previous estimatess, quantified times savings, and assessed customers' satisfaction. We finished the study at the end of July 2009. The study that we have done is unique and is opening a new field of research; therefore, no comparable study presently exists.
As for the results, the estimates were 11% to 19% savings for run time on route 467, and the actual ones are 13%, which is in the expected range. Savings could have been higher without the introduction of the OPUS card, an electronic payment system that slightly slowed boardings. Still, the STM made some improvements to the payment boxes in order to speed up boardings; also, people now have had some time to adapt themselves to the new system. The trip on route 67 originally took 35 minutes, which decreased to 34 minutes after the implementation of route 467. Route 467 run time is 31 minutes (savings of 4 minutes 20 seconds).
A slide from Julien Surprenant-Legault's presentation about the effects of the 467 express route
Surprenant-Legault theorizes (correctly, I believe) that the major reason the improvements weren't as high as predicted was because of the introduction of the Opus smart card between the before measurements and the after measurements. As I've written about before, the Opus card and magnetic-stripe card require additional seconds for each passenger, either to hold the Opus against the reader or insert the card into the slot, wait for it to read, print out a validation and then spit it back out. Instead of passengers boarding two seconds apart, they now board five or six, making the whole trip slower.
One interesting finding in the study is about passengers' perception of time savings:
For route 467 riders, a statistically significant difference exists between their estimates and the actual savings. Real travel time savings were on average 1.5 minutes per trip, while users estimated them within a range of 6.9 to 11.9 minutes. For route 467 riders, a statistically significant difference exists between their estimates and the actual savings. Real travel time savings were on average 1.5 minutes per trip, while users estimated them within a range of 6.9 to 11.9 minutes.
If we assume this same phenomenon could be replicated on other lines, it means making a lot of passengers happy with not much investment.
You can get more about this study from this presentation (PDF) given by Surprenant-Legault.
Transportation Research at McGill hosts weekly seminars about transportation issues. Surprenant-Legault kicked off the winter 2010 session with the presentation mentioned above. The last one of the season is Thursday at noon, featuring Sébastien Gagné, Kevin Beauséjour and Jocelyn Grondines of the STM's planning department. The presentation is in Room 420 of the Macdonald-Harrington Building on McGill's main campus, and is free and open to the public.
The STM will be introducing three new routes and extending a fourth during its quarterly schedule change (links go to Planibus PDFs):
Though it was reported back in January, it seems more certain now that, with all the delays pushing back the new metro car contract, the oldest cars still in service, the MR-63s used on the green line, will need to be kept longer and get an interior redesign to fit more people.
Unfortunately, the only way to fit more people into a confined space like this is to remove seats. The STM was to have put two prototype cars in service yesterday - one removes single seats near the ends of each car, while the other removes single seats near the centre of each car (removing double seats, like was done when the MR-73s were refitted, apparently isn't feasible with these cars because of all the equipment underneath the double seats).
Obviously, not everyone is happy about the idea of squishing even more people into these cars and taking away the cherished single don't-have-to-touch-anyone seats. Discussions are already under way at MetrodeMontreal.com and the Canadian Public Transit Discussion Board about it.
The Gazette's Andy Riga has gotten Marvin Rotrand to tell him that three lines - 121 Sauvé-Côte-Vertu, 467 Express Saint-Michel and 535 R-Bus Du Parc/Côte des Neiges - will be served only by articulated buses as of June. Articulated buses will also be used on the 80 (Du Parc), 139 (Pie-IX), 165 (Côte-des-Neiges) and 67 (Saint-Michel) within a year, with studies about whether to expand them to the 18 (Beaubien), 24 (Sherbrooke - downtown), 105 (Sherbrooke - NDG), and 197 (Rosemont). Aside from having high ridership, the routes also need longer stop zones to accommodate the longer buses.
Buried in Riga's piece is mention of a new type of fare the STM will be introducing on June 1. A daycamp fare will cost $12 and cover a trip for adult and 10 children under 13. (Children 5 and under already ride free with a fare-paying adult). This is similar to the family pass they brought in in 2008, which allows kids to ride free with their parents, but only on weekends and holidays.
This new fare will be welcome news for all those who take large groups of children on public transit, but will probably suck for a lot of people if this means more armies of prepubescent kids board STM buses around the island.
In case you missed it, the STM is now finally reporting on the status of the metro system using Twitter and Facebook, as well as on their homepage. So far it has reported only one disruption - the green line going down on Sunday.
Annoyingly, the reports on Twitter and Facebook are all done twice - once in English and once in French. Nevermind that the STM hasn't been the most English-friendly organization on the planet in the past, but why not just setup two accounts if you're going to do that?
The Société de transport de Montréal had a whole thing today, inviting members of the media out to the airport to show off their new bus route. I was tempted to go, but I don't get up before noon unless I really have to.
The route is the 747 Express bus, which finally provides a direct, non-stop link between downtown and Dorval Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. It replaces an awkward public transit travel itinerary that involved taking the metro to Lionel-Groulx, hopping on the 211 or 221 and squeezing in with all the West Island kids, then either waiting half an hour at the Dorval train station or walking across the entire airport parking lot to get to the terminal.
It also replaces La Québécoise's Aérobus shuttle service between the bus station and the airport that used to run every half hour and cost $16. (And that was already much cheaper than the flat-rate $38 for a cab from downtown to the airport.)
More details from Cyberpresse, The Gazette, CTV, CBC, Rue Frontenac, Metro, the STM's press release, the airport's press release (PDF), or the Planibus with route and schedule (PDF).
The route enters service on Monday, March 29, and will be the STM's first 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year bus service.
Route of the 21 Place du Commerce (in blue)
The STM has released fall schedules for its bus network, which take effect on Aug. 31. Two significant changes are worth noting:
A minor change (I'm sure there are others): the 350 Verdun/LaSalle night bus now ends at Newman and Airlie instead of the Monette-Lafleur terminus.
According to the schedule set in May, the STM is supposed to move to a proof-of-payment system starting Sept. 1. This means that you must carry your Opus card or ticket with you at all times in the metro system or on buses, otherwise you can be fined. (I assume there will be a grace/warning period before any actual fines are given in this way.)
If you haven't seen it yet, the new 2009 system map (WARNING: 10MB PDF file) currently being installed in metro stations is more colourful than previous versions. Among the changes, dated June 22: "rapid transit" routes (express and reserved-lane buses) are shown in green, and Monday-to-Friday-all-day buses are given their own category in the legend, separate from seven-day routes and rush-hour-only routes.
And while I have your attention, the STM is having an open house at its Legendre garage in Ahuntsic on Sunday, Sept. 13. Registration and the tour are free, and there are shuttle buses from the Crémazie metro station that will bring you there, since there's no parking on site.
As the city does work on Metcalfe St. that forces the 515 bus into a detour at its western terminus, the STM decided that they'd take another crack at solving the confusion problem that hits people (locals and tourists alike) when they want to take this bus: because it's a circular route, there's no East, no West, and no terminus. Both directions will bring you where you want to go eventually.
The solution? Colours!
Isn't it obvious? The blue sign is for the bus that takes the clockwide route, toward Berri and then down to Old Montreal. The yellow sign is for the counter-clockwise route that goes through Old Montreal and then up to Berri. This is consistent with the schedules which have a yellow route and a blue route on them, unless they're copied in black and white, in which case they only have one direction visible.
So now not only has the STM invented a new colour for the 515 (recycled from a failed experiment), they've invented another one too! A light blue that's just different enough from the standard dark blue to be both confusingly similar and confusingly different.
Of course, this won't solve the confusion inherent in the route's design, and will just create more. This is the first time the STM is using colours on stop signs to indicate direction, and it's a break from the standard. If transit users need anything, it's a standard framework from which to understand how things run. This idea laughs in the face of that.
The STM should do as I suggested and drop the part of the route between Berri and Peel, which is redundant to not one but two metro lines (and the 150 and 15 buses) and therefore the least-used part of a little-used line. Then they can have proper East/West designations and the confusion will be gone.
Of course, what's really going to piss people off is that in order to fit these two stops, the city had to remove 10 parking spaces along Peel (not that the bright red bags with no parking signs on them stopped drivers from parking there anyway, as you can see).
The STM has released summer schedules for its bus network. Among the notable changes that take effect June 22:
UPDATE: The Gazette has a story on the changes based off the STM press releases. Both misspell "Bois-Franc".
Meanwhile, the AMT is reducing service on the new schedule for its Nuns' Island express bus, increasing intervals from 20 minutes to 30. Mitigating this news somewhat is that the STM has just approved a new bus route, probably to take effect in the fall, connecting Nuns' Island with the LaSalle metro station.
The Réseau de transport de Longueuil, which handles public transit in Longueuil and its merged and demerged suburbs, is making a big effort to add service in a new schedule which began on Monday, especially in St. Bruno, which it had served with a handful of bus and collective taxi lines through an agreement with Veolia Transport. The contract (which the RTL points out predates its own existence) expired on Sunday, and the RTL is taking over service directly.
Among the additions, some of which are outlined in the press release:
The STM moves to its spring schedule on Monday. Here's some of what bus users can come to expect:
The biggest change comes to the 67 Saint-Michel, the STM's single busiest line, which like its counterparts along Côte des Neiges, Parc and Pie-IX will get a little brother. The 467 Express Saint-Michel takes the same route as the 67, but with only 15 stops. The STM estimates this will cut 10% off travel times (via CPTDB), thanks to the help of two McGill urban planners (thanks Dave). Other measures, such as a reserved bus lane (coming this summer) and priority traffic lights (coming in 2010), are designed to shave another 5-20% off.
The route will have 126 departures from 6am to 7pm in both directions, Monday to Friday.
The 467's stops are:
The 72 Alfred-Nobel, which connects the Saint-Laurent industrial park with the Du Collège metro, is having its route extended on both sides. On the western side, the route will end at the Fairview terminus (via Hymus), and on the eastern side, continuing on Decarie up to the Côte-Vertu metro (where all the other West Island buses stop). Service intervals will also drop slightly for this route, which operates Monday to Friday from 7am to 7pm.
Notice anything I haven't seen? Comment below.
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