TRANSIT Ridership dipped in 2016
Despite efforts to get more people to ride the bus in Saskatoon, ridership fell slightly in 2016.
Saskatoon Transit director Jim McDonald said a number of factors could have contributed to the drop, including route changes, a decline in transit use across North America and the residual effect from a month-long lockout in 2014.
The number of bus rides in 2016 dipped by 57,785 compared to 2015. Ridership dropped to 8,515,269 in 2016, down from 8,573,054 in 2015 and well below the peak of 9,406,908 rides in 2013.
The ridership numbers were the second-lowest in the last five years, although the 8,215,330 rides in 2014 include a month with no transit due to the lockout of Saskatoon Transit employees by the City of Saskatoon.
“We were hoping it was going to go up,” McDonald said in an interview Wednesday. “There were a lot of people who were coming back with really positive comments.”
Bus frequency along Eighth Street was increased in 2016 as an experiment in preparation for the introduction of a bus rapid transit system. McDonald said other route changes in response to the Eighth Street experiment may require a longer adjustment period.
Saskatoon Transit went from 28 bus routes on June 30, 2016, to 35 routes the next day, McDonald said.
The transit numbers are based on electronic fare-counters, but the city also estimates fares based on the sales of passes. Those
numbers show a slight increase from 12,216,188 in 2015 to 12,297,395 in 2016.
The federal government uses the estimated numbers when determining ridership for funding purposes because not all cities have electronic fare-counters, McDonald said.
The continentwide decline in transit in Canada remains a puzzle, McDonald said, with some suggesting the sharing economy and lower gas prices are factors.
Bev Dubois, the Saskatoon city councillor in charge of transportation, said in an interview Wednesday she heard complaints about route changes during the October election campaign.
“That was disappointing, but not necessarily surprising to me,” Dubois said of the decline in ridership.
Dubois used the example of the southeast neighbourhood of Rosewood in her ward, where she hosted a meeting on transit on Wednesday night. Many students and immigrants in the neighbourhood don’t have a vehicle and face bus rides that can take an hour and 15 minutes to reach downtown, she said.
“We have to do better than that,” Dubois said. “With transit, it’s not a cookie-cutter scenario. You can’t take what you do in Erindale and do it in Rosewood.”
Dubois pointed to improvement with Access Transit as a positive in 2016. The service for the disabled provided 3,007 more trips in 2016 and saw a 3.7 per cent decrease in trip-request denials.
The long-term plan for buses in Saskatoon entails moving to a rapid bus transit system, estimated to cost about $280 million.
Transit operations in 2016 came in $1.5 million lower than the $40.8 million budgeted, but that was offset by lower revenues.
The transit service received 1,268 complaints in 2016, the highest in the last five years. McDonald attributed the high number to route changes.