Jericho Lands | 49fl | Proposed

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by chowhou

I think you're playing a bit hard and fast with the math; For your crowding math it should be 50% passengers divided by 50% total busses, but then multiplied by 50% distance travelled meaning that if they terminate at Arbutus and halve the number of busses, the 99 should be at half its current peak crowding.

Doesn't it kind of seem wrong that if busses were coming just as often as before but only travelling between Arbutus and UBC they'd be just as crowded as the busses at Commercial Broadway today?

Not really, the 99 is crowded all the way through. We also haven't factored in induced demand: riders switching from other E-W bus routes to the faster M-Line/99 combo, or ex-drivers who switch to SkyTrain.

We also only know the numbers for westbound ridership; anecdotally speaking, the eastbound buses at UBC are nowhere close to only 50% capacity.

[chowhou]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

Not really, the 99 is crowded all the way through. We also haven't factored in induced demand: riders switching from other E-W bus routes to the faster M-Line/99 combo, or ex-drivers who switch to SkyTrain.

We also only know the numbers for westbound ridership; anecdotally speaking, the eastbound buses at UBC are nowhere close to only 50% capacity.

Well, we can either believe in the 50% get off before Arbutus number or not. Either the 99 is crowded all the way through, or it's roughly twice as crowded between Commercial-Broadway and Arbutus. It can't be both. It's not as though there's a huge amount of replacement at Macdonald or Alma, most of the riders between Arbutus and UBC are riders from the Broadway Corridor.

I absolutely agree that induced demand will bump up the transit numbers on the 99 between Arbutus and UBC, but are we really expecting it to bump up 2x? That's why I said it might make sense to go from 3 minute headway to 5 minute headway, not a full 50% reduction.

Purely anecdotally, I have never had to wait multiple busses at UBC to get on a 99 (Though my university years are behind me ). That's just standard operating procedure at Commercial-Broadway.

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Regardless of everything, I really hope they just build the goddamn thing out to UBC already in the next extension. I'm just playing devil's advocate for what they theoretically could viably do.

EDIT: On second thought, the Broadway extension is probably going to cannibalize a decent amount of the existing E-W bus traffic and incentivize UBC students to live in East Van/Burnaby. I could see the Arbutus - UBC congestion becoming very close to the Commercial-Broadway-Arbutus congestion in the very near term.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Oh I trust the numbers - it's the "just terminate everything at Jericho and Alma and things will be fine" idea that I've got problems with. At least Arbutus was more or less always intended to be a layover.

3 minutes down to 5 is 20 buses/hr down to 12, or 60% capacity (not much better than 50%) and still 2.5x more buses than the Alma "loop" currently gets. I'll concede that immediately shooting back up to 100% isn't a guarantee, but back to 60% definitely is.

Definitely YMMV then - waiting multiple buses at the UBC loop was literally most of high school in 2011-12 for me.

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Yeah, it's an option, but so's single-tracking to UBC. I'd argue that getting Phase 2's funding won't be a problem (at least with the Libs in charge); the hard part of getting the subway was fighting the NIMBYs, the Condon-ites (although they're basically the same thing) and Christy Clark all at the same time, and that's mostly over.