Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
Not a fan of Watson but I agree with him on this. The city's debt levels are high coming out of Stage 2. And going to get worse coming out of this crisis. Also, more than LRT expansion, Ottawa needs more frequent bus service, better bus shelters, better payment integration with STO and enabling new payment methods (open payment).
Personally, I think any federal stimulus money for transit should focus on bus electrification, growing bus fleets, IT infrastructure and SOGR backlogs for all cities. None of that is really sexy. But it all needs to get done. And would vastly improve the transit experience while reducing operating costs. And can actually be accomplished in 2-3 years.
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The problem with buses in Canada is that a lot of places in Canada get a lot of snow, and articulated buses cannot operate in snow, so the extent to which Canadian systems can rely on buses to keep up with growing ridership and increase efficiency is limited. Ottawa especially knows about the limitations of artics in snow all too well, and you may have heard about those troubles too...
I think rail expansion is vastly overrated in the US and buses ignored too much. But here in Canada, where both ridership and snowfall is much higher, maybe systems rely on buses too much, especially Ottawa. Ottawa, a region with over 1 million people, over 100 million riders annually, the time to convert bus to rail was 30 years ago.
Look at a city like London, located in the Snowbelt, the potential of articulated buses there is very limited. With 400,000 people and 20 million riders annually, it probably won't be long before they need to convert routes to LRT as well.