Raise the Hammer

The LRT will be combined with a re-configured bus system. Buses will always remain part of the transit system in Hamilton and in every other city. There is a very good chance that the boost to the transit system coming from LRT will finally raise the profile and urgency of bus transit to the level that the city will actually start funding it properly after decades of stagnation and cuts.

But LRT is the best solution for the Main-King corridor that currently accounts for 42% of total ridership, or about 30,000 riders per day. The 2010 HSR operational review highlighted the fact that the buses on this route are often over-capacity and plagued by drive-bys during peak hours. This is not good service!

Your impression might be that service is 'fantastic' but that's not the experience of riders who use the bus to commute when they have to wait for two or three packed buses to finally get on (as has often been my experience) and when service is minimal evenings and weekends.

Another example of poor service is that there is no attempt to ensure a proper transfer from the 6 bus to the 1, 5, 51 buses at King and Longwood. I am often waiting to cross the street with ten other riders while 1, 2, 3 buses pull up, stop and head off. Then the ten of us wait ten minutes for the next bus. The 6 and 1,5,51 stops used to be adjacent but HSR moved the 6 stop and other stop so you now have to cross two streets! I would much rather walk down from Charlton to Queen to get an LRT (and I often even do this to get the bus).

If you like the idea of BRT, don't forget that it would operate in exactly the same way as LRT, but with different technology and lower capacity and frequency. The stops would still be widely spaced and it would still run on a separated concrete track.

The fact that ridership growth overall (outside King-Main) has been flat and one of the worst in Ontario shows that most other Hamiltonians do not share your impression that current HSR service is fantastic.

The King-Main corridor is reaching its limit for buses. It can't handle the current demand and certainly not the sort of demand that would be created by the economically, densely populated corridor that the city wants and plans for.

It really is a question of using the best transit technology for the location. And with the current and future demand, that is LRT for the King-Main corridor.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2016-09-18 08:56:17