DRT's Waterfront Shuttle Misses the Point

 Happy Canada Day!

I have previously wrote about seasonal routes on my blog. TTC is not the only agency in the GTA to operate them, and Durham Region Transit implemented their three seasonal offerings. I had never taken the 100 Waterfront Shuttle, so I took a trip to the Pickering Waterfront today.

I think that while providing transit here is commendable, Durham Region Transit's target customer for this service means that it will be underutilized and will not resolve the issues that they themselves identified at the waterfront.

The Route

Route 100 operates a loop route from Pickering Parkway Terminal to the intersection of Liverpool and Annland. At Pickering Parkway Terminal, passengers can connect to other DRT routes, including the 916, and may walk across the pedestrian bridge to reach Pickering GO Station.

The route operates on weekends and holidays only, from 12pm to 9pm. Service is every 20 minutes, and is not timed with the GO train. The route does not charge a fare.

Since the East Shore area does not have regular transit service on weekends, as the 101 is weekdays only, this route provides a basic service to the area.

Intent

This route was created because of the severe parking issues at the Pickering Waterfront. There is a small municipal lot, as well as a larger private lot. Liverpool has street parking as well, but demand has resulted in some nearby residential streets having vehicles parked on both sides. The City of Pickering implemented paid parking three years ago in order to manage demand, and will I think is parking less crazy since. However, there are still challenges - especially considering that Liverpool is a dead-end. It doesn't take much to clog the street.

Since there is extensive parking at the Pickering Town Centre and the GO station, Durham Region Transit added the route to encourage people to park there and take the bus the rest of the way. This is why the route is free. It takes less than ten minutes to bus to the waterfront from Pickering Parkway Terminal.

My Thoughts

The intent to provide a shuttle service is short-sighted and ineffective. When I took it today, both directions, there was only one other passenger on board, and he also came from the GO train. No one was parking at the lot to take the shuttle. I can't blame them. A park-and-ride service works if it is time-effective - people take the GO train downtown since it is competitive and avoids a lot of headache. If someone is already driving thirty minutes towards the Waterfront, why would they park their car and hop on the bus to go the last ten minutes? 

Jarrett Walker, a transit expert, has previously spoken about how catering transit service to attract car drivers is often futile. While you might attract a person or two to the service, there is a ceiling if the transit network as a whole is ineffective. If DRT was a good network, you would get people to leave their car at home entirely. Since it isn't, you will struggle to attract people to a specific service.

While the service is free, if you're connecting off a different DRT bus, you still have to pay a fare at some point in your trip. Walker notes that "people who take buses or bikes or their feet...are mathematically correct...when they object to a free Park-and-Ride, especially if the agency is not offering a corresponding subsidy to their own preferred modes of access, which all use scarce space more efficiently." Since the 100 is so short, the customer base who could use just this route and not connect from another is, frankly, very small. I concur with Walker: I don't think it's fair that the route is free for only some passengers. Either charge a fare for everyone, or make it so that someone who taps on the 100 gets a refund from the previous portion of their trip.

The route begins operating at 12pm, I assume as that is when parking becomes a problem at the waterfront. This means that anyone going in the morning will not use transit, so it bakes in parking issues since 100% of people not walking or biking bound for the waterfront will drive before noon. 

The above three points mean the route will be low ridership, and will not be able to resolve the issues that the route aims to solve.

How can DRT improve the service?

The simplest way to improve the service is to extend a route that currently terminates at Pickering Parkway Terminal to cover the 100. My preference is route 916, which provides a cross-regional service connecting to nearly every other DRT route. By extending existing service that already serves a large customer base, you may be able to encourage people to take transit for their entire trip. Rationalizing the schedule to begin at 6:30am like the rest of the route means that you can also capture visitors prior to noon, reducing parking demand more generally. 

I think too that charging a fare is fine, as long as it is set equal to parking cost. If a group of five is paying three times as much in transit fares as parking would cost, then they will not be encouraged to take the route. I think having a tap-off fare machine at the waterfront that provides a reduced fare is an effective solution to this problem.

Conclusion

Park-and-Ride services have their place in a transit network, but I don't think transit should be installed solely to resolve issues related to parking. It is needs to be part of a holistic solution to reduce car usage, not a half-baked attempt to get people to park, just further away.