City asks for public input on bus-route overhaul
City Hall wants to hear from residents, especially on local routes, planner says
Bus routes that have run for decades will be scratched and completely rerouted in Edmonton’s massive bus system overhaul, say city staff.
Officials appealed for residents’ help Thursday, saying they need in-depth local knowledge to ensure the draft plan in fact services neighbourhoods properly.
“Almost every route is new,” said Edmonton Transit director of planning Sarah Feldman, explaining the recently released draft plan.
“We know we won’t get this right on the first shot,” she said, inviting transit riders and neighbourhood residents to attend one of 24 public workshops or review the routes online. An online survey launches April 12 at edmonton.ca/newbusroutes.
Already, the online map has been updated. The southwest will get a new express route running from the Heritage Valley park-and-ride to the Century Park LRT station, said Feldman. The local routes in the south neighbourhoods also function like express routes, funnelling all riders to the LRT or crosstown connections.
Feldman and her team are currently studying where shortcuts, bus-only lanes or queue-jumps at intersections are most needed. It’s not clear if that study will be finished in time to reserve money this fall for that work in the next four-year capital budget.
The time and dates of the public workshops are also available online. The new routes aren’t scheduled to be rolled out until June 2020.
Feldman said the redesign is intended to make service more efficient and usable for residents. The city will go from more than 200 regular routes to roughly 100, with a simplified network that runs in straight lines where possible at a higher frequency.
The budget for transit will stay unchanged.
Feldman said the new system is best understood by looking at the different types of routes being proposed:
Frequent routes: Run at least every 15 minutes from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the week, every 20 minutes during the late evening. These routes are mostly in the core of the city, where transit riders have been asking for a service that lets them run errands and travel any time of the day.
Express routes: Run from the suburbs where there is no LRT service, either all day or during peak hours. In the outer areas, transit riders said they wanted more direct, faster connections to get them longer distances.
Crosstown routes: These routes let people get around the city without going downtown, which should cut travel times. Service is intended to be about every 20 minutes.
Local routes: These routes have been simplified to run within 800 metres of every home instead of the existing standard of every 400 metres. The new routes are intended to connect key local destinations, including shopping centres, seniors centres, schools and the primary transit routes.
Public input is especially needed on these local routes, Feldman said: “We want to hear, is there a destination we missed in your neighbourhood?”
Feldman said her team is also studying options to help people get to and from the bus stop in areas that have a longer walk. This can include improving sidewalk connections, addressing traffic signal timing issues and looking at neighbourhood shuttles or on-demand service for places where ridership is too low to warrant a regular bus.
They’re also starting now to review the schools specials, which serve specific school locations.
The team intends to release an updated route plan to the public this fall and bring it to council for a vote in early 2019. They’ll take the rest of 2019 to write schedules, with a rollout across the city in June 2020. Mill Woods may get a bus to mirror the Valley Line LRT until that opens in December 2020.