A bust on busing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2011 (5078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s been some interesting community discussion on Brandon Transit recently, which is excellent, because I think it’s been neglected in this city for too long.

Firstly, the city is poised to slash bus fees almost in half, although they’re also eliminating the costly and inefficient paper transfer system, so some riders will have to pay twice for a single ride.

(This is one of three suggested options, and although that appears to be the one the city favours, it won’t be decided for sure until the budget.)

Secondly, with a fair bit of fanfare (heh), the city also launched a newly-revised Brandon Transit website at brandontransit.ca. Although their much-touted "interactive map" is an improvement over the previous version, it lacks in several key ways.

It uses a clunky ArcGIS system that prompted me to first install Microsoft Silverlight (blech!), before I could use it. A colleague skipped the install and the map worked fine, which is a little baffling, a lot annoying.

The ArcGIS map appears powerful, but it’s hardly intuitive. Get ready for instructions like: "To add or remove layers from the map click on the "Contents" button (the middle button directly under the "Details" Tab)." If you’re used to Google maps, you’ll flounder for a long while here before getting your bearings.

And yes, while you can toggle bus routes "on" or "off" as well as check to see exactly where the stops are located, that’s not the interactivity I’m looking for.

If you’re going to call a transit map interactive these days, I think you need — at the very least — to allow me to input a "start" and "end" address and give me a route planner.

Frankly, the biggest obstacle I have in taking the bus is that I have no idea which bus to take. By inputting a destination address, the map should spit route information back out at me. But it doesn’t.

The city’s going in the right direction — more data open to the public in better, more accessible ways — but I’m concerned they are busy re-inventing the wheel.

I will point everyone towards Google Transit, for example. Although it’s not strictly an open-source solution (the city would be relying on Google sticking around) it’s at least free (ArcGIS is an expensive piece of software, and it’s also proprietary).

Luckily, it actually looks fairly easy for the city to code their route information in a way that would let Google implement it on their maps. And, since the city hosts the information, it can be displayed in an open way for anyone to examine or manipulate — say, if they wanted to come up with their own, better app for Brandon Transit.

That’s the very definition of open data.

And, as an example of that, I’ll point everyone to a site called Mapnificent.

Although Winnipeg isn’t on Google Transit, it is on Mapnificent, and it’s a good example of what this site can do. Rather than showing you routes and bus stops, like every other transit service in the world, Mapnificent shows you how far you can make it on public transit in a given amount of time (say, 20 minutes, or 45 minutes).

A similar, though more design-y, map is this one of the Netherlands, which shows you how the time it takes to get places "grows" or "shrinks" depending on the time of day (ie. how often the trains are running).

I don’t think Brandon necessarily has to be on the cutting edge of transit map design (though, a London Underground-style map would be killer), but I do think a little actual interactivity in the map would be nice.

Anyway, this is all a huge aside. The reason Brandon Transit’s been in the news so much recently is all about New Year’s Eve.

In previous years, citing low demand, the city has shut down bus service on New Year’s Eve at about 6 p.m. This year, at a cost of less than $1,000, the city is keeping the buses running until midnight.

You read that right — the last bus pulls off the road at 12, just as every New Year’s Eve party in the city reaches its climax, and at least an hour before anyone will start thinking about heading home.

Brandon Transit’s "extended hours" have been extended just long enough to be no use at all.

Of course, the city also says that it’s open to the idea of running the buses later into the morning, but it will require a corporate sponsor to do so. A city-prepared estimate says that it would cost just over $7,000 to keep the buses going until 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day — but nearly half of that is for marketing.

Is $7,000 really considered too expensive for the city to swallow?

Everyone who’s ever tried to call a cab on New Year’s Eve knows that, on that one day at least, waiting half an hour for the next bus might actually be the fastest option. Just like the free bus service during the Lieutenant-Governor’s Winter Festival, this should be seen as a huge marketing opportunity for Brandon Transit.

Now, the bus service during the Winter Festival is sponsored. But the Winter Festival buses aren’t running regular routes like the New Year’s Eve buses would be.  And frankly, if you want to look at corporate sponsorship for Brandon Transit, how about getting Maple Leaf to cough up for the Monday-to-Friday "Pork Plant Express"?

If I had to guess, I would guess that the city will soon either come up with a corporate sponsor, or they’ll cough up the $7,000, and the buses will indeed run on New Year’s Eve until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.

They’ll probably be free, so there aren’t any issues with rowdies who don’t have exact change.

And hardly anyone will take it. But even though hardly anyone will take it, it’ll be an important service for those who do, and the city should commit to a five- or 10-year trial of New Year’s Eve bus service. It’s the kind of thing that I think will only take off once people become aware of it, and once they have friends who have used it.

People will really need to be coddled into using the bus, because it’s just so out-of-the-ordinary for so many of us.

I say again — the biggest barrier to me (or most people) using transit is that I have no idea which bus will get me to any particular destination.

The second-biggest barrier is that it takes too long to catch a bus, ride it around the town, switch to a second bus, ride it around town again, and then get to your destination. It’s a million times faster to drive, and usually faster to bike. Heck, from my east-end home, I’d rather walk to Starbucks than catch the bus.

None of those objections apply to bus service at the Lieutenant Governor’s Winter Festival, so bus ridership is high and everybody’s happy to take it.

Most of those objections won’t apply to New Year’s Eve bus service either. It’ll be faster and more convenient to take the bus than to catch a cab, for certain. It’ll be likely too cold to walk very far. And if you’re going to celebrate like me, you definitely won’t be driving.

The only thing that will keep me from taking the bus will be my inability to know which bus to take.

That’s where I was hoping the city’s new website would come in handy. Sadly, it’s just a flashier version of the old maps, which leave me tracing my finger over a screen, rather than a piece of paper, and trying to figure out which bus route is the purple one.

Now, some positive suggestions.

For a few hours last year, I laboured over a map of my own, trying to take the city’s "hub-and-spoke" bus model (which forces just about every bus rider to visit the downtown terminal) and switch it to a "grid" bus model.

I didn’t get very far before other priorities got in the way, but I do think an alternative transit map for Brandon could be explored. The way I see it, you could have buses running up and down major streets and avenues, just back and forth. So if you were at the Corral Centre and wanted to get to the Royal Oak Inn, you’d just catch the 18th Street bus to Victoria Avenue, then hop off and catch the Victoria Avenue bus to the Royal Oak. (Currently, you have to catch either the Kirkcaldy or Rec Centre bus, and then transfer to the Central Belt bus. Both of those take you pretty far out of your way.)

The grid system isn’t perfect, obviously, but it has the advantage of following the way the streets are lined in Brandon already, and of being easy for casual transit users to figure out.

I recently read, too, of a new transit study from the University of Illinois, which shows how a "flexible route" system works best for low-to-moderate demand routes (like all the routes in Brandon).

Under that system, buses aren’t restricted to specific routes nor tied to specific stops. Instead, they’re placed in "tubes" that offer both passengers and drivers some flexibility. Passengers can get dropped off closer to home, for example, or could hail a bus from any street corner, rather than trudging four or five blocks between bus stops.

On the face of it, it seems like something that would work well along some of the more strung-out bus routes, like in the far east or west ends.

Of course, the long-term solution to Brandon’s transit woes begins and ends with density.

Public transit works best in areas of high density — something that Brandon just doesn’t have. As long as we keep building car-friendly suburban-style development, complete with full parking lots for every big box store and strip mall, buses will be at a huge disadvantage.

And it doesn’t matter what the price is, or how often they run, or where the routes go, it just won’t be feasible to ride the bus in such a car-centric city.

(Partly, we’re hamstrung by the fact that Brandon draws so much of its economic activity from the surrounding Westman area, and no one’s taking the bus in from Rivers or Souris. When they all drive, we have to build for their cars and trucks, and that makes it more likely that city residents will use cars, too. Fact of life.)

Now, I’m obviously not a transit engineer. But I’ve read extensively on transit theory and practice because I’m that kind of a geek.

I like where the city is going in terms of revamping the transit website (although, as my above complaints make clear, it looks like a fancy whitewash, with very little in the way of new functionality). And I think the massive fare drop is an interesting move, if it passes.

Now, let’s see if we can get them running into the early-morning hours on New Year’s Eve.