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Expert: Canadian cities need to prioritize transit services

HALIFAX –

A public transport researcher says Canada’s cities should be nimble and service-first if they want to maintain and strengthen their public transit systems in a time of declining passenger numbers and challenges. labor.

While cities like Montreal and Halifax are reducing bus routes to save money or address staff shortages, a transportation and rail research consultant and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto said these decisions contribute to a “death spiral” in traffic.

“There are two negative feedback loops going on during shipping,” Willem Klumpenhouwer said in a recent interview. As routes are cut and transits are less frequent or more convenient, passenger numbers will decrease. When there are fewer fare-paying passengers, cities lose income and tend to cut more routes.

“Then you have a death spiral, as people call it,” he said.

This same cycle is affecting the transit workforce, says Klumpenhouwer, because as transit operators leave their jobs, remaining employees are asked to work longer hours. “That leads to higher attrition and less hiring, so there’s a similar feedback loop.”

Shane O’Leary, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 508, which represents public transit operators in Halifax, said the city has been losing staff at an unprecedented rate over the past year as workers have to deal with long working hours and frustrated public transit riders. service reduction.

O’Leary gives the example of a person on his way to work waiting for a bus that didn’t show up as scheduled.

“Now I’m dealing with maybe being late for work or I’m worrying about taking care of the kids, and who do I take my anger out on?” he say.

“Obviously I blame the transport operator because they’re the first person I see and I blame them. That’s what happens,” he said, calling it a “vicious cycle.”

The union president said interactions with angry public transit users made the job of operators more difficult, many of whom are working 60 to 70 hours a week to manage handle ongoing staff shortages.

Starting this week, three routes have been suspended, while another three are being adjusted and rides are being cut from 30 routes, a spokesperson for the City of Halifax said. Maggie-Jane Spray said in an email that the service cuts were developed “with consideration for the impact of both staff and passengers.”

Spray says that these cuts will allow for more consistent transit and “allow passengers to better plan their journeys, but it will also reduce the workload and stress for staff to improve maintainability.”

O’Leary said the city can improve hiring and retention by raising wages and improving working conditions — “not by making transportation more inconvenient for people.” passenger.”

Halifax pays its public transit operators $21.45 per hour for training and $22.88 per hour for the first year of employment, a figure that would increase to the maximum salary per hour. now $28.61 after four years. The city’s accessible bus operators make about $2 less an hour, O’Leary adds.

In Montreal, the city’s transit agency said in January that it would be adjusting some schedules because of “current circumstances,” adding that it could no longer guarantee wait times between flights. Buses on any line during rush hour are 10 minutes or less. .

Last week, the Societe de Transport de Montreal announced it was planning to reduce costs by $18 million, but it said the cuts would not affect service.

Toronto’s budget, approved in mid-February, proposes a 5% cut in transit service from last year, or a 9% cut from pre-pandemic levels. Critics say that decision conflicts with efforts to bring in more passengers and make the system safer.

Former mayor John Tory, who resigned shortly after his budget was passed, defended the plan by pointing out that it increased the city’s grant to the Toronto Transportation Commission by 53 million dollars and service levels are still above passenger numbers, which he said budget estimates are about 73 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Klumpenhouwer said that nearly all Canadian cities have seen a significant drop in passenger numbers because of COVID-19, adding that many cities still have fewer passengers than they did before the pandemic. The decrease in public transit use is likely tied to adjusted commuting habits and a shift to teleworking, and he said transit agencies should re-adjust routes accordingly.

“We need to think about how we do our trips elsewhere, and that’s the hard part, because it requires you to redesign your network a little bit,” he said.

Cities often prioritize routes that bring a lot of people to a central location, such as downtown. To encourage new transit habits, Klumpenhouwer said, routes should instead focus on a model that helps people move to more places.

“The theory is that this will lead to increased passenger numbers, but it will take time and the question is how much financial flexibility the agency has to have to make that happen,” Klumpenhouwer said.

One exception to this trend, the researcher says, is Brampton, Ont., where more people now use public transit than in 2019 and early 2020.

“They do important things,” Klumpenhouwer said of the city.

“They run regular service on the network, making it easy to get from one place to another. They have priority lanes for transit and really have all the fundamentals.”

He said the city is an example of successful public transport, adding that the city’s model allows people to trust the service.

“The #1 thing to get more riders is to run more services.”

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With records from Morgan Lowrie in Montreal and Jordan Omstead in Toronto. This story was produced with the financial support of Meta and the Canadian Press News Scholarship.



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