Grand River Transit's big vision could be bigger yet

Last week, the draft Grand River Transit business plan was presented to a standing committee of Regional Council. This is a document aimed at guiding the next decade for the transit system. There’s a lot to like in this plan, and some things that could make it better yet — I’ll talk about both of those below. Tomorrow (April 16th), the Region is holding a special public input session about the business plan, and we plan to be there. This is a good opportunity for members of the public to show support for ambitious transit expansion!

First, some backstory. The Region of Waterloo uploaded transit from Kitchener and Cambridge Transit to a new Grand River Transit in 2000, in part to better align transit with land use. Within a few years the Region started seriously planning for rapid transit along the conceptual central transit corridor that had been in regional land use plans for decades. This aligned with its goals to manage growth of the urban boundary through intensification. (See more in the Region’s ION documentary.) The Region didn’t just end up building the first phase of its ION light rail route, but it also redesigned the transit network with more corridor and cross-town routes including the limited-stop 200-series iXpress-branded routes. ION light rail has already helped direct billions of dollars of new development to station areas. And together with the bus network improvements, it’s been part of why transit is being used for an increasing proportion of trips in the region.

At the same time, the cities of Waterloo Region have a long way to go to become places where most people regularly take transit to get around town. As Jarrett Walker has emphasized, frequency is freedom in transit systems. It’s tough for people to choose transit when they need to plan around infrequent transit schedules or limited operating times. Most GRT routes are every 30 minutes outside peaks, some still don’t run on Sundays, and many are reduced in the summer. A handful of bus routes run every 15 minutes on weekdays; one route is every 10 minutes. But only ION itself and route 7 are every 15 minutes or better including weekends and evenings.

The new business plan addresses this in a big way. It proposes defining a frequent service standard of every 10 minutes during weekdays and 15 minutes evenings and weekends, and implementing this frequent service standard on 16 routes. It also proposes improving weekend and evening service and daytime service consistency. It’s hard to overstate how transformative the implementation of these changes would be, as they would make transit dramatically easier to use across a large part of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge. Beyond individual rides becoming possible without a schedule, it would also enable easier transfers between routes.

The business plan reflects a continuation of the trajectory of substantial service increases that went together with ION. It proposes a 63% increase in service hours over 10 years with a 34% net increase in operating costs. It anticipates only a 27% ridership increase, though we suspect that underestimates the transformative impact of frequent service.

There’s a lot of other great things in the plan:

• A new overnight service network with buses every 30 minutes. Currently there is a single Late Night Loop for a few hours after midnight Thursday–Saturday, but otherwise no service between around midnight and 6am.
• Children 12 and under would finally ride free. Currently the exemption is 4 and under.
• Increased Affordable Transit Program income-tested discounts.
• Using GRT Pay to let employers pay for employee transit use. Currently there’s an available Corporate Pass discount, but it’s not easy for an employer to offer a transit pass as a benefit like they can offer a parking pass.
• New highway express routing for long-distance connections.
• Coverage for developing areas of the cities.
• Increased fixed- and on-demand transit in the townships.
• Expanded specialized transit.

And there’s some not great things or omissions:

• Fare increases “to match service expansions, inflation, and comparability to peers”. It’s unclear how much this means exactly, but continued aggressive fare increases would be a worry.
• No mention of open payments (the ability to pay with any debit/credit card) or Presto integration. These would reduce the barrier to people trying transit.
• No expansion of proof-of-payment and all-door boarding beyond ION. This is worth considering to speed up transit and especially with the planned introduction of articulated buses.

The plans also mention increasing ad revenue, which likely means more bus wraps. Recently there was a plan to start wrapping ION trains, which was fortunately rolled back after advocacy; however, more ads got directed to buses. Council understood that turning our flagship transit line into a rolling billboard undermines the point of the investment — to make transit appealing so people choose it and we can build our cities around it. Wrapping buses is similarly counterproductive. It is hard to build a transit culture if you treat the experience of fare-paying riders inside the vehicle as less important than the attention of people driving by. Ad wraps that cover the windows make the ride less pleasant and even make some riders nauseous. If we’re trying to increase transit use and make transit a more respected travel mode, this is a bad call.

The GRT business plan does not include a detailed priority order or specific budget increases. This is a plan for the next 10 years and it would be implemented through the annual Regional budget process, so depending on Council’s commitment to the plan, every year could prove to be a battle to implement the changes.

We’d like to see these changes roll out sooner than 10 years, especially around frequency. We’re a growing region, so stalling on transit improvements puts more pressure on very expensive road expansion, and it means less of our growth will go to the parts of the region where people don’t need to rely on cars. Just like with ION itself, making these changes is an investment in the future and it will pay off not just through progress on climate goals, but more directly through reduced infrastructure costs per capita.

Within that decade, we would like to see not just ION stage 2 built — which is not in this plan — but proactive planning for additional rapid transit expansion. Currently these kinds of large capital works are approached as something separate. But if we hope to get more transit built, we need to get ballooning construction costs under control — and an accumulating body of evidence suggests that means bringing more capacity in house. Funding for planning, procurement, and project management of transit works is something that could well fit into a business plan. And this doesn’t need to be limited to incrementally tackling bigger public works like ION. With more bus frequency and more traffic, it will be increasingly important to make adjustments to streets to prioritize transit to keep it moving. An increased in-house transit capital team could proactively implement transit priority measures.

All of that said, the plans overall represent a huge improvement to Grand River Transit and are well worth supporting. If you’d like to share your own support for or feedback about the plan, info is on GRT’s site.