Congestion, delays plague Metro transit system
TransLink report reveals speed, reliability in ‘steady and consistent’ decline in Metro
On an average weekday, buses that travel the busy King George Boulevard and 104th Avenue corridor in Surrey have to contend with long waits for left turns, cars clogging the right lane and the usual traffic congestion.
That’s why it’s the worst bus corridor in Metro Vancouver when it comes to delays, with buses on the 13 routes that use the two thoroughfares spending a combined 156 hours on a weekday stuck in traffic.
TransLink released a report Monday that looks at bus speed and reliability in the region, where bus ridership is quickly growing and almost two-thirds of transit journeys are by bus.
The news isn’t good.
Up to 85 per cent of bus riders in Metro — 250 million journeys — were affected by slower service last year, thanks to a “steady and consistent” decline in bus speeds due to congestion on the roads, and 80 per cent of bus routes are slower today than they were five years ago.
“For bus customers, delay on the roadways is something that everybody has first-hand experience of,” said Daniel Freeman, TransLink’s senior manager of bus-priority programs. “I think this is something that in our region, and frankly across North America, is becoming a growing problem and risk for bus ridership and transit performance, and we’re seeing it putting increasing pressure on our finances and our ability to deliver service where we need it the most.”
TransLink estimates that more than $75 million per year, or 12 per cent of the Coast Mountain Bus Company’s total operating costs, can be attributed to delays on the road. Buses spent 686,000 hours in motion between stops in potential congestion in 2018 or 12.5 per cent of Coast Mountain’s 5.5 million annual scheduled service hours.
Another 16 per cent of the company’s operating costs are recovery time spent at terminus stations for breaks and to ensure on-time departures — 888,000 hours in 2018.
That recovery time must be increased if buses are more irregular.
The report lists the top 20 corridors in the region with the most delays.
In addition to King George Boulevard and 104 Avenue in Surrey, Highway 99 through Delta and Richmond, and 41st Avenue in Vancouver rounded out the top three, with an average of 872, 772 and 642 person hours of delay, respectively, on a weekday.
That measurement is calculated by multiplying passenger load by travel-time delay.
The delays on those three routes affect an average of 112,600 people per day or 12.2 per cent of the region’s total bus ridership.
There’s a danger that if buses continue to slow, people will decide against using transit. TransLink touches on this in the report, noting that delays and problems with reliability make transit a less-attractive option compared with personal vehicles, ride-hailing, taxis and even walking or cycling.
“This is a big problem, and one that is going to grow if we don’t take action collectively, but conversely it’s not an intractable problem,” Freeman said.
“This is something that there is a ton of solutions out there.”
One way that TransLink improves on-time performance — the measure of the percentage of buses that arrive on their destinations on time — is adjusting bus schedules to accommodate congestion, which it does quarterly.
Since 2014, on-time performance has improved on 61 per cent of bus routes, despite buses getting slower. But those adjustments, which include lengthening trip times and putting more vehicles on the road to maintain frequency, added $2.5 million to $5 million per year to Coast Mountain’s annual operating costs. “There’s no customer benefit other than just treading water,” Freeman said. “That’s money that we would rather be spending on putting more service on the road for people.”
Other things it has direct influence over include stop locations, all-door boarding and fare policies to reduce the amount of time spent at each stop, and design routes to avoid slow streets or congested intersections.
However, most tools that could make buses faster are within municipal or provincial control, including installing transit priority traffic signals, designing intersections and roads to have features like bus-only lanes and queue jumps, and managing how curb areas are used.
TransLink is committing $14.6 million over four years to help municipalities fund bus speed and reliability improvements on their streets. The transit authority gave out $1.5 million in 2019 to Burnaby, Delta, North Vancouver city and district, and to Vancouver.
Freeman said many initiatives aren’t expensive or complicated, and can yield big results.
Anthony Perl, a professor of urban studies and political science at SFU, said he’d like to see TransLink and those with authority over the roads fast-track road changes and pilot projects that are making a real difference in cities like New York and Boston.
“I think that there’s no question that adjusting rules and priorities of street space in Metro Vancouver is essential for the continued success of our bus transit system and more-and-more evidence from around the world and around North America shows that giving buses priority works,” Perl said.
TransLink’s Mayors Council will discuss the report at a meeting later this week.