Comment 120694

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted February 03, 2017 at 09:09:08 in reply to Comment 120683

It is important to put things in perspective. HSR has suffered from anemic ridership growth for the last twenty-five years due to decades of being starved of resources and vicious cycles of service cuts and fare increases.

The current improvements are not dramatic (service frequency has not increased significantly and no new routes have been added). They simply somewhat ameliorate the bad service on busy routes (drive-bys and over-capacity buses have been reduced, not eliminated).

Most importantly, the service increases were entirely funded out of fare increases (not transit levy increases) and the fare increases started before service improved (slightly). Council rejected contributing even a small proportion of the increase from the transit levy as originally recommended. HSR management actually predicted that fare increases (combined with very modest service increases later) would lead to fewer riders. And that's what happened.

We would need to see really significant improvements and investment (e.g. new lines, increasing frequency from 30 minute to 15 minutes) ... or much better higher order transit ... like LRT or BRT to really boost ridership.

HSR still has much worse service and and smaller fleet than 30 years ago when the population was much smaller. And contrary to what Dreschel claimed, many other systems have seen big ridership growth in the recent past (2006-2014) growth in Hamilton was only 5% while St Catharines, London, Mississauga, York Region, Brampton, Waterloo, Durham saw increases between 21% and 101%.

http://hamiltoncatch.org/view_article.ph...

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2017-02-03 09:19:07

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