Bike Walk Bus Toronto

 Hey besties!  As many of you know, I spent the week in Montreal. This is the first of two posts that explore some observations I made on my trip. On my trip, I took the 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu route from de l'Acadie to Station Côte-Vertu. This trip was slow, overcrowded, and was far from an acceptable service. This blog will speak about some of the issues with the route, what STM plans to do to improve service, and why I think this plan is lacking. Current 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu map, courtesy of Moovit. The Issues The big issue at hand, quite simply, is the route is obscenely busy. Despite headways of up to every six minutes during peaks, buses are regularly packed. This 121 is: The furthest north route connecting the east and west sides of Ligne Orange; Lined with high-density housing and important shopping destinations; The most frequent service west of Décarie. On my specific trip, I noted a few things. Firstly, the headway is assuming that all buses are articulated, 60-foot ve...

 Hey guys! A lot of transit discussion in Toronto is on the busiest routes. They are regularly delayed, not frequent enough, and serve a large number of people. I brought this up in my last blog post, related to bus lanes. Little discussion occurs concerning low-ridership routes.  For the sake of argument, a threshold of 1,000 riders a day or less will be used. According to the most recent TTC ridership statistics , from 2018, seven routes qualify. An additional two routes are recent additions since then, and surely carry less than the threshold. As such, we will work with a total of nine routes. In preparation for this piece, I took eight of the nine routes, mapped below. The remaining route will be discussed further in depth later. Please note, none of the routes are in Etobicoke or Scarborough. I will speak to each route individually in the order I took them in, and then provide some conclusions about what should be done about these routes to improve their performance. 93 P...

Toronto needs and deserves more bus lanes, and there is no valid argument against them. I said it! A few days ago, I saw this tweet thread from August, who often speaks about transit issues in Toronto. I have attached the first tweet, you can see the others by clicking on it. toronto could justify bus lanes on most arterials in the city just by sheer number of buses and the ridership on these corridors (this isn't the case in most US/CA cities) and yet we only really have one proper corridor — august 🍂 (@augustAP12) May 6, 2022 August is 100% correct: the ridership on Toronto's bus routes alone justify some material improvements, end of sentence. Unfortunately, Toronto only has one bus lane corridor: the Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside RapidTO corridor, used by the 12D, 86, 116, 905 and 986 bus routes.  While many other corridors have been proposed, little progress has been made due to opposition. In this piece, I will explain why Toronto's lack of bus lanes is out of line...

 Hey pals! One of the most recognizable pieces of public transit infrastructure is the bus stop. They can look different, have different amenities, but serve the same purpose: to allow people to board and alight buses. However, in this piece, I argue that many bus stops are not transit infrastructure, but are car infrastructure that, once again, prioritizes automobile traffic over everyone else. I will take a look at two cities in southern Ontario, being Toronto and Guelph, and look at how they handle bus stops in a picture-essay format. Part 1: Toronto One of the most pervasive ways that automobility is situated within hard infrastructure is bus alcoves. Everyone knows them to see them, little lanes that allow buses to serve stops without 'blocking traffic'. I put blocking traffic in quotes because that's a very car-brained take on what is simply transportation.  The issue with alcoves is that they force buses out of the flow of traffic, which means bus drivers must fight ...