No room on the bus due to student overload
After a long day ’s work and waiting at the bus stop in the freezing cold, you just want to go home. But the Transit Windsor bus just passes you by because it’s jam-packed with St. Clair College students.
It’s a frustrating and demoralizing experience that’s happened repeatedly since the start of January for daily Transit Windsor rider Lisa Bassett, caused by a sudden explosion in ridership on the three South Windsor bus routes serving the college’s main campus.
“My bus pass is $95 a month,” said Bassett. “That’s a lot of money to get passed by every day.”
Compared to January of 2017, ridership last month was up 43.7 per cent on the Dominion 5, 49.5 per cent on the Dougall 6 and 39.4 per cent on the South Windsor 7. Most of the extra riders are going to and from the college, according to a recent Transit Windsor report that highlights this “significant increase in student ridership.”
“The buses are packed every single day,” said Bassett, who takes the Dominion 5 daily between her home in the Riverside Drive/McKay Avenue area to her job at a South Windsor daycare near Dominion Boulevard and Grand Marais Road. The problem usually happens on the ride home in the afternoon.
On a very cold day several weeks ago, she was waiting at her stop, along with an elderly woman in a wheelchair when the packed bus passed them. The shivering woman was forced to call for a taxi. Bassett said she was shocked and disgusted by how the woman was treated.
On another occasion a woman at her stop remarked she changed her work schedule so her shift ended at 5 p.m. instead of 4 p.m. so she could avoid getting passed, but the bus passed them anyway.
Last Friday, Bassett said, she was waiting with a girl at her stop when the bus passed, and the girl remarked: “That’s the second one that’s passed me.”
Bassett added that she’s also seen mothers with baby strollers and toddlers passed by.
“It’s ridiculous. There’s no reason people should be waiting out in the snow for an hour.”
Transit Windsor officials are meeting with St. Clair College to discuss the situation, according to the bus service’s executive director, Pat Delmore.
“The buses are leaving St. Clair full, so we’ve been adding extra buses whenever possible,” Delmore said.
St. Clair’s vice-president of international relations, Ron Seguin, said the surge in bus use is directly linked to the college’s strategy to attract international students. Their numbers have risen from 300 a few years ago, to almost 2,500 currently. And international students don’t drive. They rely on public transit to get to and from their apartments, which are primarily located in the downtown area, Seguin said.
“The numbers are dramatic,” he said, forecasting that figure will rise to 5,000 in the coming years. “It’s good. There are a lot of people in town renting things, buying things. The economic benefit is quite dramatic.”
Seguin said the college is eager to talk with Transit Windsor about increasing its service to St. Clair.
“It’s going to be required,” he said, especially as the number of international students continues to increase. He expects there will also be increased demand for better bus service at night and on weekends.
Delmore said Transit Windsor needs to study times when ridership is high to map out a strategy that could include adding express buses. If a bus passes a rider because it’s full, he said, an extra bus is added to the route if one’s available.
“It’s a good problem to have,” he said of the full buses. “It’s frustrating, we know, to a rider who may be bypassed, but we’re working on solutions.”
Transit Windsor noticed a jump in ridership at the start of school in September, when ridership was up 16.5-22.7 per cent on the three routes compared to September 2016. But the five-week strike by college faculty caused numbers to tank starting in mid- October, followed by the January surge.
Year-end statistics for Transit Windsor show a 3.4 per cent increase in overall ridership, from 6.5 million individual trips in 2016 to 6.73 million in 2017. That’s a significant improvement, said Delmore, considering ridership is rising two per cent nationally, and is stagnant for most transit services similar in size to Transit Windsor.
The overall increase can be credited to a 14.4 per cent rise in ridership among students, following the September 2016 adoption of a UPass system by University of Windsor students, who all pay $66 per semester for universal bus passes.
Rising ridership translates into more money for the transit system from the province, which this year is providing Transit Windsor with $3.8 million in gas tax funding.