YYCguy
Active Member
I don’t travel along that route very often, but there doesn’t seem to be enough room to create transit only lanes from downtown to McKnight.
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Calgary Transit
- Thread starter Always_Biking
- Start date
trtcttc
Senior Member
I passed by a few of the upgraded MAX stops, now they'll have to go in and replace all the signage that said "301 BRT". It's not just the post, the horizontal signs say the stop then in small letters at the bottom says "301 BRT". This kind of waste drives me crazy. It's just so simple to have named it before they upgraded the stations, especially when they ended up choosing green. Isn't the city still in a climate emergency? Maybe try some waste reduction.
Route 301 bus gets new name: Max Green - LiveWire Calgary
Calgary Transit is changing the name of the 301 bus, but it comes with no service alterations to the route itself. Starting Sept. 1, the Route 301 bus will officially become part of Calgary Transit’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network with a renaming to Max Green. This goes along with the Max...livewirecalgary.com
Lol North-Central Calgary, you might not get your Green Line but how about a MAX Green?
CBBarnett
Senior Member
If we are really talking about waste, the biggest issue remains the wasted hours of busses stuck downtown circulating on the avenues.
These upgrades don’t help with that but are otherwise a nice upgrade in both formalizing the stops and vastly improving the pedestrian and transit user experience waiting to board, on an otherwise fairly bleak corridor with sloppy sidewalk.
Calgary Transit (and Calgary in general) seems to default to the capital spending approach to make improvements. These are good but when it relates to the bus system I’m increasing convinced a comparatively cheap circulation plan is what is actually needed to make more substantial gains in effectiveness of the system.
Ultimately the thing that a circulation plan should reveal is the cheapest solution to improve transit quality, speed and reliability - just prioritize transit over cars at-grade, particularly on key corridors and in downtown/major destinations.
whatchyyc
Active Member
The signage is just a printed decal anyways, "301 BRT" already replaced "Max TBD" that was there before. Also, Green was a last minute political move when CT had a different color lined up
accord1999
Active Member
The NC BRT study noted the problems with the DT as well, and has some details about possible DT improvements including a bus only lane and change in routing to improve it.
However one thing that I don't see discussed is that even if CT gets bus only lanes and divert significant car travelers onto buses, is there enough bus capacity? Before the 2014 oil crash, the Centre Street bus routes had the most overloads in the system. It does CT no good if all these former car drivers can't even get on a bus during rush hour.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
i do wonder how many more busses you can “create” during rush hour simply but reducing congestion for them downtown. Countless routes are subject to all sorts of bus bunching and delays downtown as a result of lack of priority. In the current state transit needs more busses to do less, as they must account for the time lost trying to grind through downtown at rush periods.
Again, it’s why a circulation plan has some of the best value of what they can do. Costs relatively nothing compared to major infrastructure , and you get a bunch of your busses back rather than have them wait in traffic downtown as they have for the past 50 years. It doesn’t solve everything of course, just a cheap way to make the existing fleet and service stretch much farther.
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CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
I recently read the Route Ahead summary from 2024 and CT wants to do a lot but has not been able to get funding for everything council and the City has wanted them to do. They're hundreds of millions of dollars behind in required funding for the Primary Transit Network. At one point CT was honest that they didn't have the trained drivers to make a PTN happen, because of layoffs during Covid, I don't think that is the problem anymore. Everyone knows what needs to be done but the money isn't there. I feel bad for CT, you have these issues that throwing money at would actually solve, unlike some things where money isn't the issue, but you're not getting the funding.
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MichaelS
Senior Member
I think the challenge is if you look at Transit as a whole, and the mountain of money going to the Green Line, it is hard for transit to cry poor. Perhaps some better prioritization a decade ago would have lead to a better overall transit network, but c'est la vie.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Conceptually, the most expensive part of Calgary Transit's operation is lack of priority over cars in all the ways from major capital projects to operations to day-to-day, particularly where they need it the most (like downtown and entering/exiting major destinations like hospitals).
The caveat for Transit project's that sink their cost-effectiveness is always hidden in the concept of priority. In practice, what Transit projects most often do is aim for Transit "priority" with the following fine print: prioritize transit ... as long as it doesn't meaningfully impact vehicle trips on the same corridor.
For example, reasonably effective transit-only lanes on major avenues only requires some new paint, a few signs and a few signal tweaks - probably a few million bucks and some traffic enforcement changes, it's money but hardly the tens or hundreds of millions like a single interchange, or billions for a new LRT line. The bus-only lanes would be a huge travel time improvement for dozens of routes and reliability improvements not achievable under any other possible project. Transit would also meaningfully close some travel time gaps for some trips, encouraging further revenue as mode shift occurs. Almost any bus route could run 25%-50% faster in rush-hour downtown without spending an additional dollar on a new bus or hiring a new driver if we took an existing congested lane and gave over exclusively to transit.
In practice, instead of a simple implementation of bus lanes happening that improves bus travel times at the expense of regular traffic, what will happen is that transit priority caveat kicks in and things immediately get watered down. A traffic engineer model will flag that the delays to regular traffic would become "unacceptable" to an arbitrary target they have. To fix this, the transit project would need to bloat - require additional infrastructure capacity and modelling to reduce the possible impact to regular traffic flows. All this becomes in scope of the project, ballooning the costs, watering down the benefits and creating all sorts of political risks that are likely to kill the project before it even gets off the ground.
In the most extreme examples, a transit project counter-intuitively makes transit competitiveness worse - transit's limited dollars are actually helping it's competitors more than itself. Most projects that add bus bays do this as the only travel time improvement is gained by the driver in the car no longer stuck behind a stopped bus, while the bus is now slower due to having to wait to merge back into traffic.
All that pro-transit rhetoric aside - we can still be pragmatic; not everywhere needs absolute transit priority. But if we are serious about transit cost effectiveness and cheap ways to improve a cash-strapped service, the pavement is already there. We just have to take it away from cars and give it over to busses. Yes this might mean more congestion for regular vehicle traffic - but with the benefit of cheap, faster and far more competitive transit for a low budget cost. That's the trade-off. That's literally what priority for transit actually means!
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