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Calgary Transit

Interesting to see Ottawa's plummet since they began their LRT project, with no recovery since it opened. I'm sure it recovered in absolute numbers, but still being in a close heat with us is interesting.
 
UrbanWarrior said:
Interesting to see Ottawa's plummet since they began their LRT project, with no recovery since it opened. I'm sure it recovered in absolute numbers, but still being in a close heat with us is interesting.
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Probably more to do with work patterns of federal employees
 
lemongrab said:
The rankings are neat, but it would be nicer to see the actual numbers...some of these must be pretty close
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The article has them, just in a paragraph:

Based on this metric, Metro Vancouver had 77.92 transit journeys per person in 2023 — behind Montreal’s leading ratio of 92.38 and just ahead of the Greater Toronto Area and Durham’s (Metrolinx service area) with 71.73.​
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This was followed by 53.84 transit journeys per person in the metropolitan region of Calgary, 50.12 in Ottawa-Gatineau, and 35.84 in Edmonton.​
​
So it's the story of the Big 3 leading the pack as expected, with Calgary and Ottawa being the next tier down. I'd imagine within the GTA there's a whole range of relatively different transit ridership rates, some of their suburban communities are actually really high performing.

Rather than changing relative rankings, the real trend we want to see is increase in absolute number of trips per capita. I think Calgary Transit could get there, we've been stagnated for so long because we can't quite get passed that next funding and prioritization hurdle to have a wide-spread frequent network (some promising signs with the MAX routes though). If a few more material TOD sites take off as they seem to be poised to do, and we keep it up with reasonably dense suburban node development, it'll start the curve upward hopefully.
 
CBBarnett said:
The article has them, just in a paragraph:

Based on this metric, Metro Vancouver had 77.92 transit journeys per person in 2023 — behind Montreal’s leading ratio of 92.38 and just ahead of the Greater Toronto Area and Durham’s (Metrolinx service area) with 71.73.​
​
This was followed by 53.84 transit journeys per person in the metropolitan region of Calgary, 50.12 in Ottawa-Gatineau, and 35.84 in Edmonton.​
​
So it's the story of the Big 3 leading the pack as expected, with Calgary and Ottawa being the next tier down. I'd imagine within the GTA there's a whole range of relatively different transit ridership rates, some of their suburban communities are actually really high performing.

Rather than changing relative rankings, the real trend we want to see is increase in absolute number of trips per capita. I think Calgary Transit could get there, we've been stagnated for so long because we can't quite get passed that next funding and prioritization hurdle to have a wide-spread frequent network (some promising signs with the MAX routes though). If a few more material TOD sites take off as they seem to be poised to do, and we keep it up with reasonably dense suburban node development, it'll start the curve upward hopefully.
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Would be interesting to see it broken down by modes. For Vancouver and Toronto, despite their built out rail networks, the bus ridership is very high. CTrain is one of the highest ridership LRTs, at least pre pandemic but I think the bus routes underperform. The frequency is too low for many routes which make connections really time consuming.
 
Frustrated by the very slow 6th Ave WB in the afternoon on the Max Yellow, as well as the slow 7 and 13 routes I'm going to train to Heritage and Max Teal it to the 54th Ave stop. Wish me luck.

I've also figured out if I leave the office late it could also be quicker to train to Westbrook and again Max Teal it to 54th Ave stop.

I was deterred by google suggesting it was a 17 minute walk to the stop from my house but I timed it this morning it got it down to 9 minutes.
 
trtcttc said:
Would be interesting to see it broken down by modes. For Vancouver and Toronto, despite their built out rail networks, the bus ridership is very high. CTrain is one of the highest ridership LRTs, at least pre pandemic but I think the bus routes underperform. The frequency is too low for many routes which make connections really time consuming.
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They do provide this through those quarterly APTA report - your summary is correct. Calgary vastly outperforms on light rail, but has long been underwhelming for regular bus traffic. Winnipeg - hardly a transit friendly city - has about the same bus ridership as Calgary with our extra 500,000 people, greater density and more centralized employment clusters. Some of this is the LRT taking ridership away from a hypothetical bus, but we should be having better ridership even then.

The other trend we are weird on is how bus ridership is not the majority. People underestimate how crucial the bus network is to major cities. Vancouver and Toronto, for all their quality rail infrastructure, still see substantial majority of their ridership from buses.

Calgary needs to act on some of the good plans we have for buses - keep pushing this primary transit skeletal network, actually solve downtown bus congestion with dedicate lanes, make busses competitive to driving between major destination through making them faster and with fewer stops.


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lemongrab said:
It would be tough to do with the green light timing, but ideally 6th and 9th would run opposite of current traffic flow so [de]boarding happens on the better side of the road.
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Interesting idea, I can see the logic of sending buses up a bus-only lane opposite one-ways, avoiding having to cross all those lanes of traffic would be huge.

It isn't an issue to cross the lanes on 6th but I see it on 5th and on 9th. 11th or 9th Street could be used as a street to go back into the flow of traffic.
 
CBBarnett said:
They do provide this through those quarterly APTA report - your summary is correct. Calgary vastly outperforms on light rail, but has long been underwhelming for regular bus traffic. Winnipeg - hardly a transit friendly city - has about the same bus ridership as Calgary with our extra 500,000 people, greater density and more centralized employment clusters. Some of this is the LRT taking ridership away from a hypothetical bus, but we should be having better ridership even then.

The other trend we are weird on is how bus ridership is not the majority. People underestimate how crucial the bus network is to major cities. Vancouver and Toronto, for all their quality rail infrastructure, still see substantial majority of their ridership from buses.

Calgary needs to act on some of the good plans we have for buses - keep pushing this primary transit skeletal network, actually solve downtown bus congestion with dedicate lanes, make busses competitive to driving between major destination through making them faster and with fewer stops.
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Good points. I'd like to see a better bus network as well. I don't take the train often, but my observations as a transit user are that the bus network still needs improvements. My own experiences are that if both source and destination are near LRT stations, the LRT is 100 times better than the bus, due to higher frequency, being on time more often, and the time of the trip being shorter.

Some of those points you mentioned, like dedicated bus lanes and fewer stops could make a difference.
 
CBBarnett said:
They do provide this through those quarterly APTA report - your summary is correct. Calgary vastly outperforms on light rail, but has long been underwhelming for regular bus traffic. Winnipeg - hardly a transit friendly city - has about the same bus ridership as Calgary with our extra 500,000 people, greater density and more centralized employment clusters. Some of this is the LRT taking ridership away from a hypothetical bus, but we should be having better ridership even then.

The other trend we are weird on is how bus ridership is not the majority. People underestimate how crucial the bus network is to major cities. Vancouver and Toronto, for all their quality rail infrastructure, still see substantial majority of their ridership from buses.

Calgary needs to act on some of the good plans we have for buses - keep pushing this primary transit skeletal network, actually solve downtown bus congestion with dedicate lanes, make busses competitive to driving between major destination through making them faster and with fewer stops.


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Interesting to see our transit ridership growing fastest among the major cities (except GO but that's a commuter service likely driven by decrease in WFH) with busses growing twice as fast as the LRT.
 
trtcttc said:
Interesting to see our transit ridership growing fastest among the major cities (except GO but that's a commuter service likely driven by decrease in WFH) with busses growing twice as fast as the LRT.
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Bus growth will only accelerate with the major service investments being made in budget adjustments last year. Finally making up for the cuts/lack of service expansion from the 2015-2020 period, and never implementing service adequate for the infrastructure investment made on the BRT routes.
 
darwink said:
Bus growth will only accelerate with the major service investments being made in budget adjustments last year. Finally making up for the cuts/lack of service expansion from the 2015-2020 period, and never implementing service adequate for the infrastructure investment made on the BRT routes.
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Yeah we've unfortunately been stuck on that starting line for a pretty good growth plan for bus frequency for almost a decade. Hopefully the progress starts coming quicker now.
 
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