The passage of the business case for the new main library on Tuesday night was greeted with a universal declaration of relief. Finally, we are moving forward with the replacement of the 50-year-old building at the corner of Paisley and Norfolk, which is now antique and almost as useful.
Meanwhile, down at Guelph Central Station, someone got off the Route 3 Westmont bus and had to wait between 15 and 20 minutes for their transfer. Apparently, building an 88,000 square foot library is easier than having a transit system that works for people.
Now I don’t want to take anything away from the library accomplishment, and not everything is about transit, but I do want to make this about transit.
At least for a minute. The night before the library vote, somebody tweeted at Mayor Cam Guthrie, “Thanks, @guelphtransit, for cutting #3 bus schedule: people who come home late from work stand in dark at Central Station for 35 minutes waiting for their connection. I get cold and tired; women who wait alone at night get harassed.”
The mayor responded, saying that “The transit service review, that is already underway, will address all routes.” He added that anyone being harassed should call the police.
Fair enough. I will add that during my hotel clerk days, I had to call the police a number of times to deal with noise complaints and harassers in non-emergency situations. Having said that, and appreciating the tremendous difficulties that police face, these incidents could have escalated and killed me seven times over before the cops arrived.
On to the other point from Guthrie, and I wonder if we’re not imbuing the transit service review with a mythological power that will fix all our transit problems.
While I’m sure that the review will have some interesting insights, the interim report from the service review on Solid Waste noted that this sector of the city was delivering on all fronts save for the Material Resource Facility, which we’ve known has been problematic part of this sector for some time. I can see it now: “Guelph Transit is delivering a great quality of service for riders, but making sure that buses get to stops on time every time is going to require further investigation.”
This. Is. What’s. Infuriating. Forget signal prioritization. Forget new buses. Forget new routes. Forget times posted at the stop. Forget tweeting about service interruptions. Just focus on this question: Why isn’t a bus getting to every stop, every time, all day and every day?
Take a spin on the Guelph Transit Twitter feed and you will see a bizarre pattern. Hardly a day has gone by lately where either the Downtown-University Express or the Downtown-Stone Road Express hasn’t had some kind of service interruption. These buses, that only run at certain times a day, almost always seem to stop running in part, or on the whole, on a daily basis.
I know what the city response is because I’ve been on the receiving end of it so many times. There’s traffic, trains, mechanical issues, and other reasonable exceptions to answer why a bus is occasionally late, but to cancel the express buses everyday? The only thing regular about these routes is that they’re bound to be cancelled.
The problematic new development though is the changes made to certain routes at the beginning of the year that places them on 40-minute schedules at certain points of the day.
Note that most buses are on a 30-minute schedule, meaning these exceptional routes never line up with the arrival and departure times of the other buses. Also note that one of the routes affected, the No. 3, services St. Joesph’s Health Centre, which impacts an awful lot of Guelph’s most vulnerable.
There’s a groundswell of disgruntlement from people in the area of St. Joseph’s that take the bus, and now find themselves out in the cold. These are seniors that live in the area. These are people with disabilities or injuries needing rehabilitation. These are personal support workers who are trying to do the jobs that are so vital in the community.
I received the story of Bonnie, one such PSW who travels all over the city to assist her mostly elderly clientele. Back in the fall, it was easy for Bonnie to pop in and out of her office across the road from St. Joseph’s as she went to and from appointments, and now she’s calling cabs just to make her appointments on time.
For the staff at St. Joesph’s that use transit, the change has added an hour to and from work on top of their previous commute.
Area residents that call Guelph Transit to complain are told that they can always walk down to the corner of Woolwich and Speedvale to catch the much more frequent #99 Mainline. No problem. That’s just an extra 15-minute walk. In the winter. Over the ice and snow. And did we mention a lot of the people affected are seniors.
Of course, this is always Transit’s remedy. Bus not coming on time? Get an earlier bus! Bus not coming often enough? Walk to another stop! Also, sorry, but there aren’t enough people riding your bus to justify frequency, but really, as soon as more people start riding this infrequent and unreliable route, we'll totally add more buses.
In the meantime, anyone who can get their own car and use it, is going to do that because when it takes you 45 minutes to an hour to get across town on the bus and Transit’s only solution is to add 30 minutes to your trip by taking an earlier bus, you don’t need a service review to know that something’s wrong.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of the problems with transit have been systemic for years, if not decades. Answering why the same bus is cancelled every day with a service review is like fixing a leak in the bathroom by tearing down and rebuilding your house. That’s not to say that the service review is not worthwhile, but I wonder just how much more it will tell us about the issues of transit beyond what we already know.
In the meantime, transit users are being asked to wait for over a year till we actually do something about the problems affecting them today. They’re told to be patient. That we can’t throw money at the problem. That professional problem solvers know more about their bus route then they do, and they just have to wait for that expert opinion.
Imagine a sinkhole in the middle of Gordon Street. Imagine it forcing the diversion of traffic and adding 15-20 minutes to everyone’s commute. Imagine if the city told everyone that complained about it the hole can’t be fixed until an exhaustive review of the structural integrity of all of Guelph’s roads was complete. Imagine City officials saying we can’t just throw money at the hole to fill it without understanding how the hole was made in the first place. Imagine the outcry.
Yes, we’ve waited a long time for movement on a new library. How much longer must we wait for a new mindset on transit?
