After I reported that the seventh seat was empty, I emailed Joanna Morton, who works for BC Transit in media relations. When asked about the seat, she replied that:
BC Transit hasn’t heard if a seventh commission member would be added to the Victoria Regional Transit Commission. Members of the Commission are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, not BC Transit.
So where exactly in the bureaucracy it is? As the FAQ on the Lieutenant Governors site neatly explains:
Legally, it refers to the Lieutenant Governor acting on and with the advice of the Executive Council or Cabinet.
This probably means that the appointment is waiting on the provincial cabinet to approve it, although why that is I don’t know. And more importantly: Is the current commission not legally empowered to act as a regional transit commission because it lacks a full seven members?
The Wall of Fame selection committee is looking for people to add to the wall in 2010. The Wall of Fame is:
a means to honour individuals who have been instrumental in the development of Oak Bay’s parks, facilities, and programs and who have exercised extraordinary commitment to the community of Oak Bay or performed voluntary services deemed to have been of great importance to the community.
The nomination form (PDF) must be submitted to Director of Parks & Recreation, currently Lorna Curtis, by Februrary 28th of this year. Winners will have their photo and information posted on the wall in the Social Lounge at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre.
Also looking for people is the newly expanded Community Initiatives Committee. The committee has not only gained new responsibilities, such as creating an Oak Bay Village plan and active transportation initiatives, but also a new councillor, Nils Jensen. As I mentioned previously, the next meeting of the committee is the 5th of February (see the calendar in the sidebar for more details), so with the closing date of February 16th for nominations there will be at least one more meeting of the old committee. Details about nominations can be found in the announcement (PDF).
Why has the Victoria Regional Transit Commission only currently have six members on it? Since the 2008, the seventh seat has sat empty. According to the BC Transit Act, “A regional transit commission consists of not fewer than 7 members”, yet the commission currently only has six. The act then goes on to state:
The following persons must be appointed under subsection (4) as members of the regional transit commission for the greater Victoria metropolitan area:
(a) the Mayor of Victoria;
(b) a Victoria councillor;
(c) the Mayor of Esquimalt or Oak Bay;
(d) the Mayor of Saanich;
(e) a Saanich councillor;
(f) one of the following:
(i) the Mayor of Sidney;
(ii) the Mayor of North Saanich;
(iii) the Mayor of Central Saanich;
(g) one of the following:
(i) the Mayor of Colwood;
(ii) the Mayor of Metchosin;
(iii) the Mayor of View Royal;
(iv) the Mayor of Langford;
(v) the Mayor of the Highlands;
(vi) the Mayor of Sooke;
(vii) the electoral area director of the Juan de Fuca electoral area.
As the current commission consists of Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton as Chair, Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard, Sooke Mayor Janet Evans, Central Saanich Mayor Jack Mar, Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, and Saanich Councillor Susan Brice, by my reckoning we are merely missing from the list above (b) a Victoria Councillor.
It was moved by Councillor Coleman, seconded by Councillor Thornton-Joe, that Council rescind
Councillor Geoff Young’s nomination to the Victoria Regional Transit Commission and nominate
Councillor John Luton to the Commission.
Yet, there is no record that Geoff Young ever sat on the Transit Commission prior to this date. The 2008 annual report (PDF) makes no mention of any of the councillors sitting on the commission, only Mayor Fortin. I have emailed BC Transit a few weeks back but as of yet have not yet received a response.
Yesterday I talked about some of the teething challenges that the new UVic/Downtown express bus, the 15, nee Dogwood Line, was having. Thankfully a lot of these problems have fairly easy fixes:
New-ness – This will only be solved by time and it will.
Advertising – For BC Transit’s part, they could use some of that empty advertising space, both inside and out, to help promote the new line. Metro in Los Angeles has run some pretty good ads and increased choice ridership by a decent amount as a result. Express buses are loved by choice riders. UVic/Camosun and their respective student societies should work to get people on the ground to pamphlet their bus stops and let people know about the new buses, especially with the separated 15 stop at UVic.
Stops – Most of these are fairly easy fixes as well.
UVic – As I mentioned, a lot of UVic students are opportunistic riders, so the riders of the 15 will come from the 4, 7, 11 and 14. As can be seen from the image to the right, there is a massive amount of space between the exchange and the SUB. Given there is no space in the exchange for the 15, kicking out another bus to make room would keep the downtown-bound routes together. A logical route would be the 26, which is one of the busier routes, so would benefit from the extra space in front of the SUB, and its route only overlaps with a short section of McKenzie St. with the 39. Moving an existing bus line with established ridership is hard, but is easier than building up a new ridership if nobody knows the bus exists or is hard to easily find.
Placement of bus route stops @ UVic
Fort @ Douglas – The City of Victoria is fairly transit friendly and is likely to be amenable to removal of parking spots to expand the bus stop here. As a bonus, the spots are in front of the Municipal Finance Authority building, who don’t have the same concerns as a storefront retail business with regards to parking.
Potential expansion of Fort @ Douglas stop
Fort before Richmond – A much harder stop, because the stop is on an island bounded by two roads, so it can’t be easily expanded. One option would be to have the 11 not stop here, as it stops just after Richmond about 100 m away, where the 15 currently does as well. This would keep the 14 and 15 at the same stop.
Stop on Fort before Richmond, with two double-deckers superimposed
Mistaken schedules – I don’t even know if BC Transit is even aware of this issue up ’til now, but this is a fairly easy fix.
As a last note, I think BC Transit should break out its express routes, the new 15, the 28 Express, the 70, etc. and brand them differently, much like Translink did with the B-Lines.This kind of product differentiation is a great way to attract choice riders, people who could drive but choose to take a bus. Of course, it isn’t news that transit agencies are bad at marketing their own products, a fact which hurts their cause immensely.
Late last year BC Transit introduced a new express route to UVic from downtown, the 15 (previously called the Dogwood Line). While this is only the second week of the new UVic/Camosun term, the buses are very empty, with the 14 still taking the bulk of the passengers along their (mostly) shared route. Why?
The route is new – New services take some time for people to get used to their existence, so early ridership numbers are not usually good indicator of future performance. However, I don’t think this is the only problem.
Confusion of signage – While in the planning stages, BC Transit started the process of adding the new route to the electronic signs on the buses. But most of this early work was undone when the transit commission decided against calling it the Dogwood Line, so only a portion of the buses were tagged with 15 UVic/Downtown Express and the rest had Dogwood Line. By this point this appears to have been fixed.
Advertising – The new route has had zero advertising and barely even got mentioned in any papers. Any notice got shoved alongside the mention of the new 10 route along Bay. There are a bunch of organizations that could have stepped up to the plate for this. First and foremost is BC Transit itself, but the confusion of naming mentioned in the second point didn’t help. UVic Students Society and their Camosun equivalent, plus UVic and Camosun themselves could have gotten involved. So should VIHA, which runs the Royal Jubilee Hospital that lies about half-way along the route.
Stops – 15 is designed as a limited stop bus. Largely due to lack of space, there are a whole bunch of problems with the specific choices for stops:
The UVic stop is in front of the SUB, not in the main transit exchange. This is because of lack of space, but better planning could have made this easier. This placement means that the natural ridership of the 15, the current users of the 4, 7, 11 & 14, don’t see the 15 when they are waiting at their usual stops.
There are missed stops along the way that make no sense. Two of the biggest stops they miss are Fort @ Douglas and Fort just before Richmond. Both are major boarding points for the 14 and to a lesser extent, the 11.
Mistaken schedules at stops – Some of the downtown stops show the 15 on the printed schedule at the stop but are not actually stops for the 15. This just adds confusion.
None of these are intractable problems and they will be solved, one or another. Tomorrow I will talk about some of the solutions that I see. The addition of the 15 has been a long time in coming and I am glad BC Transit is finally starting to think more about express & limited stop buses.
The province has decided to blog, this time about their upcoming changes to the Water Act, changes that are very controversial, to say the least. It will be interesting to see how their comments policy plays out as plans become more concrete. (The Tyee)
The Supreme Court of Canada has loosened libel laws, meaning good things for free speech and investigative journalism. (The Globe and Mail)
Much like the ALR here in BC, Toronto has a Greenbelt. However, all in not well in paradise, as farmers flee due to restrictive bylaws and problems with suburban neighbours. (The Globe and Mail)
Volunteerism is a tricky problem, as it is hard to get people to give up precious time. I am not sold on the concept that “people are busier now”, but new micro-volunteering might help. (The Globe and Mail)
Also in the vein of volunteerism, the Lions Club, the largest of the service clubs, has actually recorded an increase in numbers in the past year, bucking the trend that has gripped many of the service clubs in the past decade.
While many transit organizations are in the middle of financial meltdowns, including the MTA in New York, BC Transit is set to buck the trend and expand bus service here in region (PDF) for the second time in less than six months. This fall brought (PDF) the new 12 and 13 routes out of UVic, some changes in service and more hours, while this January will bring two new routes, late night buses and the balance of the just over 40k more service hours.
The first of the new routes is the cross town 10 route, running from the Jubilee Hospital to Esquimalt Dockyard along Bay St. and Esquimalt Road. This hasn’t been without controversy, as residentsalong Bay St.expressed concernd about the narrowness of Bay St. and “buses backing up traffic”.
Route 15 (Dogwood Line) map
Joining the 10 is a new express route from Downtown to UVic. Route 15, nee the Dogwood Line, will shave 3 minutes off the current fastest route to UVic, the 14, with limited stops along the way. One of the challenges of running new buses to UVic is the lack of space in the current exchange, built in 1995, well before UVic’s student population hit nearly 20k, of which nearly 30% of which use the bus. To this end, the old bus exchange will soon become a new bus exchange, although it currently isn’t clear if the 15 will be using that space.
Also coming are late night buses (PDF), an oft-requested service for those of us who actually like to spend time downtown after the sun goes down. This service won’t be cheap, costing BC Transit about $7 for each of the nearly 17,000 estimated riders during the 3 month trial period. Earlier cost estimates (PDF) put each bus at ~$400/hr to run, vs between $60 and $93 usually. This is mostly due to the extra shifts needed in operating and maintaining the fleet. Amongst the future options for payment include a U-pass cost increase, given the expected ridership is mostly students.
Lastly and on the subject of fares, BCTransit has been looking for input on their fare increase plan, set to be implemented in April 2010. Currently they plan on removing the discount cash fare, addition of an off-peak pass and increasing nearly every other pass, ticket and fare. Full details in their press release (PDF). The date for feedback closed on the 15th of Dec and the transit commission will be voting on the plan on January 12th, 2010.
All in all, this is good news for transit riders, although maybe one of these days we might even get some rail transit here in the region, although I suspect it will be a long time before it comes to UVic.
What really gets me about these removals from the Tree Farm Licenses is that are an explicit violation of the social contract that timber companies signed up to when they took on the TFLs. In return for access to Crown lands for forestry, the companies had to operate local sawmills and manage their private lands “sustainably”. Guess the second two parts of that agreement have kind of been forgotten, as the Times Colonist article says,
Cash-strapped WFP wants to concentrate its forestry operations on Crown land and needs capital to renovate its mills.
In a slightly better note, they have discovered a use for broom: biomass fuel (Goldstream News Gazette). While that broom is going to other places, I wonder if enough broom could be pulled out of some of the other parks in the region to feed Dockside Green’s biomass plant. As far as I know, they are still looking for biomass to burn, a task made harder by the lack of sawdust and wood chips from the shutdown of many of the mills on Vancouver Island.
So why is Ford money being used to save this GM bus? Because one day in 1955 a woman decided that she didn’t need to get up just because of her colour. The rest, they say, is history.
Interestingly, the same year that the Lightning Route was being built, another street railway got it’s start up north. That was the Scranton Suburban Electric Railway in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Why Scranton? Jane Jacobs was born in there in 1916; who was later made famous by her opposition to Robert Moses in New York.
So the new alignment study is out and it (Times Colonist, BC Local News), as I predicted, takes Douglas St to the Highway and then the E&N route. All is good except for one little detail: they ditched the centre running lanes for curb lanes. What a lovely disaster.
So lets count the ways they have set themselves up for disaster:
Curb lanes will be slower running than centre ones, because there is simply more chance for cars to stop or slow the transit vehicle, be it bus or train. Centre lanes have a major challenge with stops, as they mentioned in the article by the BC Transit CEO and was the public reason that the Chamber of Commerce opposed it last time. However, many cities have solved this problem successfully, something the Human Transit blog points out.
Where is the bike lane going to go? Sandwiched between the transit lane and the parking? Spacing Toronto has a good post about what they do in Copenhagen.
Which brings us to parking. Are they going to remove the parking or take away a travel lane?
Given BCTransit is likely to be choosing buses for this, how are they going to convince the ICF to let them pave part of the E&N?
That is a lot of fail. There are two open houses, one this Thursday between 4 and 8pm at the Colwood Muni Hall and another between 1 and 7pm on the 20th at the Victoria City Hall. I will be out of town on the 20th at the Gaining Ground Summit, but I hope I can come away with some answers after this Thursday.
