Bus Transportation - Part A
Over the past years, I have attended many Bus Rapid Transit presentations.
My wife has been a big supporter and user of the transit system over the years. I have only sporadically used the transit system in the last 10 years myself. Most of the time, my work requires me to drive to many sites with little to no warning, and preprogrammed transportation does not fit well into that usage pattern.
I have spoken in detail to some of the team working on this system and I realize a few things about this group: first, they are very dedicated and well educated; second, they are ‘hoping’ that ridership will follow the detailed modelling and planning they have spent years preparing.
COVID-19 may have great long-term impact on mass transit of all types, or in six months’ time, the world might be settling down and getting back to more traditional transportation usage in all markets.
There is a chicken and egg question about the new arena. To me it is simple. If permanent, non-moveable BRT stations are planned, then these should wait until the final arena location is identified. That is assuming as well that it proceeds post Covid. I agree that the new library location is significant but it cannot carry the BRT system on its own and is only a footnote in ridership to a larger BRT program.
We deserve a BRT system that can quickly adapt to changes in ridership and the greater city infrastructure around it. Saskatoon is home to many fabrication experts. The City of Saskatoon should have the BRT stations designed to be modular in design but in such a way that they appear and feel as permanent construction, with a system and plan to allow them to be moved to a new location where they are set up and operational again within 12 hours or less. There are too many variables around proposed ridership volumes, street fairs, and sudden street closures due to broken watermains to put all our money into fixed locations without the best chance to adapt to ridership or construction whenever need be.
Recently, the city announced it was paying $535,000 for a one-year test of an electric bus. Even if $234,300 is provided by a Federal Government Fund, seriously, the City is getting further away from reality on our current situation around this pandemic. The City announced it was further spending $100,000 for each of the next two years to just study potential electric vehicle use. The City Administration is acting like nothing is going on around them to which they need to pay attention. This is definitely not the time to spend large sums of money on a redundant bus which will haul even fewer riders than normal each day. In the world of a pandemic and greatly diminished ridership, this is the last thing any logically thinking person would do.
If the City is trying to gain knowledge through this hugely expensive ‘test’ of electric buses, they only need phone the city of St. Albert, Alberta and ask them everything they want to know. They could even pay to send select staff to observe the St. Albert operations at different points in the yearly seasonal cycle.
Once again, this Mayor and the City Administration prefer these extended situations instead of the simplest of solutions. Try the simple solution first for a change and then evaluate if you need to do anything further that is so much more expensive. St. Albert has a similar climate to Saskatoon so basic knowledge they have gained through their own operations would be beneficial to Saskatoon and our future goals.
When I grew up here, I used to regularly ride our electric buses back and forth to downtown from Richmond Heights. They were simple and efficient. They had issues when they had to deviate from where they were designed to run and sometimes, they would pop off their overhead power wires. But this was the old system. Many European cities have a network created on a simpler premise which would work better for us than what we originally had back then. Even if our core bus service ran on electric and the periphery ran on diesel, diesel hybrid, or battery electric, we could greatly improve our bus service if that were a real intent of council. The environmental load of the mass of batteries in such buses is something too often ignored.
Decades ago, Vancouver bought up our electric buses as they knew the potential of what we already had but were abandoning. Now we want to undo this since our current diesel buses are expensive and no longer environmentally suitable.
I believe that the City has to finally act to relocate the downtown bus mall. The current situation is a huge burden on the local area and it is well past due for the City to have suitably dealt with this.
As reported in the 2019 Annual Report, the City of Saskatoon debt is $331,400,000. Also reported is that this is well below the $558,000,000 that we could borrow. Too many poorly conceived and executed projects have cost us dearly. Put in other terms, every child, working adult, and senior citizen owes about $1,180 within this debt. Now if you realize you owe this, do you still think it is prudent to spend $535,000 ( - $234,300 Federal Fund ) on a bus test, plus another $100,000 for each of the next two years to just consider electric vehicles all while still planning to go further into debt for a Bus Rapid Transit system during this pandemic? When I review my own property tax assessment, a larger portion of my taxes are spent on debt charges than snow removal and garbage collection combined. The more we borrow, the fewer services we are receiving and it is high time this is realized and dealt with.
Bus Transportation - Part B
In May of 2017, an Internal Auditors report compiled by PwC stated;
“IA recommends that formal ridership data be tracked by route and stop. For the purpose of transit service/route planning, tracking performance at the individual route level is essential to enable transit planners to make informed decisions concerning the level of transit service.
The tracking of this data would allow for formal consideration of alternatives such as flexible transit services. Demand-responsive and flexible transit may be more efficient alternatives where low population densities exist, or where ridership is low during certain times”.
Later, a City Administration Response in November of 2019 stated that they agreed with the recommendation and will continue to refine the data collection.
I started attending public Bus Rapid Transit events when they started being publicly available in 2017.
I soon realized that this proposed new BRT system was not flexible enough to be moved to new locations if the ridership volumes were not sufficient where originally planned and built. For more detail on this, please see Topic – Bus Transportation Part A.
Also, at the same time, I heard how the current City Transit system was running down routes where they became filled to capacity way before the route was completed which meant the full bus would skip past and leave the riders on the sidewalk at the subsequent stop. This caused the City to have to send out smaller buses in a hurry to try and find and pick up those that were left behind.
To me, there had to be a better way to predict ridership. Large shipping companies use RFID tags on things. These radio frequency identification tags are similar to those magnetized swirls you often see on everyday products in stores except they have a little more intelligence.
When I found out that the BRT team was not currently considering real-time predictive modelling for this new system, I took it upon myself to go talk with the Head of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Dean quickly agreed that this was a reasonable project that grad students could take on to formulate a complete working program for the City. A collaboration could take place between the U of S and the City to find a Made in Saskatoon solution. I passed this information then back to the BRT team at a presentation at the Saskatoon Club but nothing has come of it as far as I am aware.
The system would work something like this: people could take an RFID sticker and put it on the back of their bus pass. But they could also choose not to. For those that did, as they walked up to a bus stop, a local antenna would pick up their presence and it would tell the computer that you were there waiting. Each bus would register the tags as people got on and off the bus as well at various locations around the city and at various timeframes. Over time, this system would learn that a particular RFID number is waiting for a bus to travel through to the University, for example, at 8am on weekdays. Every few months, any rider could take off the old tag and put on a new one if they wished to start fresh. But the predictive modelling of their own bus use would again start at zero until some history was built up. Ideally, people would opt to keep the same RFID tag for at least an entire season. The longer the tags are kept active, and the more people that are using this to help City Transit, the better our bus system can predict and react to ridership trends in real-time. While the system would not know your name then, it would know your travel patterns using transit. Any time you stopped at a bus stop that you used before at a regular timeslot, the system would have some predictive chance of where you want to end up.
With real-time predictive modelling, City Transit would know way ahead of time if a bus will be filled past capacity and they could then send out an infill bus even before the designated route bus had passed through its other stop locations.
The proposed system would be isolated from the actual bus pass itself. While the overall City Transit system can track your bus pass use, this proximity detection system would be separate and used only to see usage in real time, to know, for example, that 12 people are standing at a bus stop. Beyond this, if there is historic RFID tracking information, the system might know that 7 people are most likely going to take a certain bus to the downtown bus mall and the other 5 are probably waiting for a different bus heading to another destination.
Another side benefit is to help with bus transfers. The system would have some ability to know that there are people on an arriving bus that will most likely need to transfer to a different bus that is just about to leave the terminal. This could signal the destination bus to wait a moment longer so these arriving passengers can transfer. This is not dissimilar to what happens in airports where connecting flights are required.
