By James Bow

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about my attempt to leave the car at home and use transit more often. Since then, I’ve bought my first Grand River Transit monthly pass in over 15 years. The experiment has gone well. I’ve been pleased with the service I’ve received. The number of steps on my pedometer is up, and my fuel bill is down.

I’m no stranger to the GRT, but riding it more regularly has given me a better sense of the hard work its personnel have put in to carry the millions of riders that take public transit in Waterloo Region each year. There have been things that have impressed me, and there have been things that could do with improvement.

On most days, my commute on the GRT gets me on board the 200 iXpress route. That is a wonderfully convenient service that zips across the region far faster than local routes, and its schedule of a bus every 10 minutes means that one doesn’t have to wait long for a bus to arrive. The displays showing when the next bus will arrive in real-time are also a great help in easing the frustration of waiting for the bus.

Anybody who thinks the proposed LRT won’t have the ridership it needs to succeed need only ride the 200 iXpress during rush hour. Indeed, one morning, after the rush was over, my iXpress bus was packed to bursting. We ended up leaving almost 20 passengers behind at stops between Kitchener’s downtown terminal and Laurier. That’s not good. Given the popularity of the route, five-minute frequencies are justified, especially between Kitchener’s downtown and Waterloo’s universities when school is in session.

Sometimes I found it quicker and more convenient to avoid the downtown terminal by taking outbound routes like the 8. This can be hit or miss, but if I can connect between two points on a single route, my ride is much quicker. The GRT has brought in new routes which do that, but we are a ways off from a proper grid system that limits the amount of doubling back we do, changing buses at transit terminals.

The decision to move the 12 off of Fischer Hallman and onto Westmount has been a boon to me, and to a number of riders I see picking up the bus en route. In combination with the 8, service on Westmount has been doubled between Union and University, although the GRT should consider tweaking the schedules. Both buses operate at 30 minute intervals between rush hours, but they tend to run less than five minutes apart from each other. So you get two buses at a stop within five minutes, followed by a 25 minute wait. If it can, the GRT should consider spacing things out, so that service is closer to 15 minutes on Westmount.

Incidentally, I always have my iPhone close at hand, and one app that has helped me navigate the GRT has been Ride GRT, offered for free by developer Marc Piche. Piche takes the GRT schedules (publicly available in a data-friendly format) and transforms them, allowing you to figure out when the next bus is scheduled to arrive based on your nearest stop. You can pick your favourite trips, or different times of the day. With this app, you don’t have to fumble with timetables, and it saves paper.

It does only tell you when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, however, and not when it’s actually likely to arrive. Unfortunately, until Grand River Transit invests in NextBus — a service the TTC and Guelph Transit uses to display the real-time arrival of buses and streetcars — this will always be a limitation we have to deal with. And I think this should be the next improvement that the GRT embarks on.

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James Bow is a writer and a father of two in Kitchener.
You can read more about him http://bowjamesbow.ca/