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Calgary Transit

RouteAhead update draft:

It's mostly stuff we've seen before, but the fundamentals are really solid. One thing that I hadn't seen yet is the proposed route for the NW Hub Streetcar (it's in the yellow highlight):
1685045595969.png
 
jhappy77 said:
RouteAhead update draft:

It's mostly stuff we've seen before, but the fundamentals are really solid. One thing that I hadn't seen yet is the proposed route for the NW Hub Streetcar (it's in the yellow highlight):
View attachment 479990
Click to expand...
I don't believe this is a streetcar being proposed. It's a wheel-based route(s) to improve transit in the area.

I know they looked into multiple technologies to serve the area (gondola, streetcar, tram line, etc.), but value, community integration, flexibility, and readiness favored internal bus routes to connect the nodes in the area.
 
Northeast service change proposal https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/news/northeast-route-review.html

Route 100 North Pointe-Airport-McKnight Westwinds: rerouted east of the airport, would travel on Airport Trail and 80 Ave to a new terminus of Saddletowne instead of its current routing of Country Hills Boulevard/104 Ave/Métis Trail to McKnight-Westwinds

Route 128 Cornerstone/Redstone: service improvements and all-day service to match the 145, minor rerouting in east Skyview Ranch and use of 80 Ave instead of 88 Ave near Saddletowne

Route 136 Corner Meadows: new route providing service to Corner Meadows

Route 145 Skyview Ranch: 2-way west Skyview Ranch service and removal of service from east Skyview Ranch

Route 157 Saddletowne-Stoney Industrial: rerouted to use 88 Ave instead of 80 Ave near Saddletowne

Route 161 North Pointe-Stoney Industrial: cancelled

CF5D433F-887D-4F9C-9FF4-308DC2AE955D.jpegB7B077D8-5C2D-470A-9A6A-CDFB84A8EE13.jpeg
 
Transit Apologist said:
Northeast service change proposal https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/news/northeast-route-review.html

Route 100 North Pointe-Airport-McKnight Westwinds: rerouted east of the airport, would travel on Airport Trail and 80 Ave to a new terminus of Saddletowne instead of its current routing of Country Hills Boulevard/104 Ave/Métis Trail to McKnight-Westwinds

Route 128 Cornerstone/Redstone: service improvements and all-day service to match the 145, minor rerouting in east Skyview Ranch and use of 80 Ave instead of 88 Ave near Saddletowne

Route 136 Corner Meadows: new route providing service to Corner Meadows

Route 145 Skyview Ranch: 2-way west Skyview Ranch service and removal of service from east Skyview Ranch

Route 157 Saddletowne-Stoney Industrial: rerouted to use 88 Ave instead of 80 Ave near Saddletowne

Route 161 North Pointe-Stoney Industrial: cancelled
Click to expand...

It's remarkable that Calgary Transit are proposing service changes but provide only vague information on what the frequencies are or would be, and no explicit information on where the stops are.

Is it because the frequencies are too depressing to admit to in public? Or because they are defined by a nonrepeating finite number series that requires vector calculus to solve? Or because no one at CT cares about what riders care about? Or all three?
 
Routing the 100 on to the “goat path” aka 36th street is such a mistake. The traffic on that stretch is horrible at times! It should skip 36th and avoid the congestion, until such time as 36th is widened!
 
ByeByeBaby said:
It's remarkable that Calgary Transit are proposing service changes but provide only vague information on what the frequencies are or would be, and no explicit information on where the stops are.

Is it because the frequencies are too depressing to admit to in public? Or because they are defined by a nonrepeating finite number series that requires vector calculus to solve? Or because no one at CT cares about what riders care about? Or all three?
Click to expand...
It's weird because they deliberately highlight the route changes will improve frequency and reduce travel time - I am taking a big guess here that that's the point of the changes in the first place - surely they ran an analysis to estimate that? Could they not have provided?

E.g.
  • "Travel time from Saddletowne to Airport reduced by X minutes"
  • Frequency of Route 100 buses increases from X to Y per hour or every X minutes to every Y minutes"


1685723887055.png
 
Previously critiques of the user-unfriendly change-log approach aside, the Summer 2023 Calgary Transit service adjustments are here: https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/news/summer-service-changes-2023.html

Not much note worth at a glance except LRT late night frequency improvement:
1685725822047.png


Best guess (because the current frequency isn't provided in the update) is this increases frequency from 15 minutes to 10 minutes from about 8:30 - 10pm on weekdays (late evening service isn't specified as weekend or weekday).

Incremental improvement, but good to see - 10 minute or better frequency will now be common weekdays from 6am to 10pm on both lines.
 
Something they need to sort out with the app is expiry of single tickets. Currently, single tickets expire 7 days after purchase. The downside of this is that it causes people to make multiple small transactions (i.e., people buy 1-2 tickets at a time to avoid having tickets expire and wasting money), which is annoying to the customer, and costly to the City (more transaction fees). I’m not sure what the rationale for this is, but when you buy a book of tickets, it’s not like it expires after 7 days, so I’m not sure why they don’t make this change.
 
adamyyc said:
costly to the City (more transaction fees)
Click to expand...
My guess would be fees are a %, but no insider knowledge on that.
adamyyc said:
I’m not sure what the rationale for this is
Click to expand...
stored value is generally annoying to manage - I'd guess since the app allows the city to measure the outstanding stored value, that a conscious choice was made to limit it.

A solution would be to make a faster one click way to buy a single ticket -- with fare capping in the app the concessionary tickets can slowly whither on the vine.
 
adamyyc said:
Something they need to sort out with the app is expiry of single tickets. Currently, single tickets expire 7 days after purchase. The downside of this is that it causes people to make multiple small transactions (i.e., people buy 1-2 tickets at a time to avoid having tickets expire and wasting money), which is annoying to the customer, and costly to the City (more transaction fees). I’m not sure what the rationale for this is, but when you buy a book of tickets, it’s not like it expires after 7 days, so I’m not sure why they don’t make this change.
Click to expand...
The first time I bought tickets on My Fare I bought 10 of them, not realizing they were expiring within a week :mad: Even if they bumped it to a month instead of 7 days I'd be happy with that.
 
adamyyc said:
Something they need to sort out with the app is expiry of single tickets. Currently, single tickets expire 7 days after purchase. The downside of this is that it causes people to make multiple small transactions (i.e., people buy 1-2 tickets at a time to avoid having tickets expire and wasting money), which is annoying to the customer, and costly to the City (more transaction fees). I’m not sure what the rationale for this is, but when you buy a book of tickets, it’s not like it expires after 7 days, so I’m not sure why they don’t make this change.
Click to expand...
100%. It's mean and cheap and has no reason to exist. Would any other customer facing business work this hard to make it difficult for customers to pay? Amazon patented one-click ordering in 1999; it was a 'game changer'. Here's the process for buying a transit ticket - once you have gone through the process of setting up your credit card in the app:
  • Open app
  • Click "buy ticket"
  • Click "adult single ticket" (add clicks if you want to change person type)
  • Click to accept ticket rules
  • Click to select number of tickets (at least one is the default)
  • Click proceed to payment
  • Click place order
  • Enter your CVV (3 numbers)
  • Click to activate ticket
  • Click to activate ticket
  • Click to activate ticket, no really, you have to click three times to activate a ticket. I only have to click OK twice to format my hard drive.
And if you're not a frequent user of transit (aka a potential customer that can be won over with a good experience), you have to go through all the purchase clicks every single time because the ticket expires in such a ridiculously short time. I'd be happy to buy 10 at a time and risk a ticket expiring if I had a year to make that happen; but a week?

It's not a technical problem; I looked through a dozen major/relevant agencies that use the same Transit app that CT does; about half of them don't have any mention of expiry -- and perhaps that means that they don't expire their tickets. Of the ones that do mention it:

Pittsburgh, Denver - 45 days
Salt Lake City - 90 days
Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati (and other Ohio agencies) - 180 days
Saskatoon - 365 days
York Region ON - tickets "never expire"
There are other best practice things that we could and should do like fare caps -- rather than buying passes in advance
 
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