This past Monday was another statutory holiday, so I tried to use on-demand transit again with the thesis that, on this third occasion where the service was exclusively employed to get people around town on a holiday, it couldn’t possibly get worse.
I was wrong.
First, if you’re going to have a system where people hail a bus using a phone app, you should probably make sure that the app is in working order.
I wanted to go to Riverside Park for the Labour Day Picnic that started at noon. It was 11 o’clock-ish so I reached for my phone, called up the Guelph Transit app and tried to book a ride, and after resetting my password twice and several forced refreshes of the page, I was able to book a bus that would get me from my home in the west end to Riverside Park in an estimated 50 minutes.
The normal travel time for this trip is about 30 minutes.
Strike two was the roundabout trip through Guelph to Riverside Park with a detour down to College Avenue and then to Guelph Central Station. Why can’t you take bus trip in this town without stopping at Guelph Central Station?!
There was one poor soul sitting there at the station, likely unaware that buses were only on-demand that day, and the driver kindly offered to give him a ride. I was rerouted down Eramosa Road and up Stevenson to Speedvale where we dropped off our weary friend before I was finally delivered outside the Evergreen Seniors Centre.
The trip took a total of 30 minutes, better than the original 50, but the exact same amount of time it would have taken me had conventional service been running that day. Plus, I would have had the benefit of relative certainty: There are posted times when the bus is scheduled to arrive at a destination, and you don’t have to fight with an app to hail a bus that will *eventually* come around and get you.
The Labour Day Picnic was largely drama free. There was lots of talking to labour leaders, lots of chats with election candidates, and lots of catching up with old friends, so it was a relatively good time. The drama? That came with the ride home.
The app continued to be glitchy in the afternoon, and after several of minutes of trying, it just tells me that it can’t find any buses in the time frame I want. So now what? The app doesn’t really have a function for this eventuality.
Fortunately, I was on Woolwich Street, and the #99 Mainline still has conventional service on a holiday. Every hour.
After getting the #99 downtown I got off (again) at Guelph Central Station where there were about five buses just waiting around. I sat down in one of the “shelters” and tried to hail a ride again to get me the rest of the way home. There was nothing. I tried a time 10 minutes ahead. 20 minutes. 30. Still nothing.
So I walked across the street to where a Guelph Transit employee was talking to two women, apparently they were having issues too. I said that the app wouldn’t let me book a bus and gestured to all the buses around us, including the one we were standing in front of. Yeah, he said, you’ve got to book early because a lot of people schedule buses to get to work on holidays.
This seems like a disclaimer you should get when you log on to the app, but let’s pause for a minute to note that this “meh” reaction to a customer complaint is not unusual for transit. Many transit users in Guelph have been acclimatized to overwhelming apathy from city employees about problems with transit service, which is why they complain to social media and not to the city, transit or council.
Now eventually I was able to get home, obviously. A transit operator driving a mobility bus pulled up a couple of minutes later and said that she was heading to the Willow area, my ‘hood. Total travel time was 30 minutes, the exact same amount of time it would have taken me to get home from the park with conventional service.
I’ve now taken four trips with on-demand transit, and only once did I get home faster when compared to conventional service. Between that, the glitches in the app, and the fact that the exact pick-up and drop off point can radically change your travel time, we have to seriously ask the question, is this worth it?
Whatever cost savings we get out of running on-demand service on holidays cannot be equal to the loss in reputation and reliability that transit suffers every time a rider has an experience that’s anything less than a nine-out-of-10. Is this creating new users, or pissing off the current ones? I know the answer, does the city?
And on a personal note, I have to say that it’s obvious that on-demand transit was doomed to fail. Guelph Transit can’t deliver conventional service issue-free, what the hell made them – or us – think that on-demand would run any more smoothly? The joke, as always, is on us, the transit user.
