This week’s article is about how induced demand applies to transit. It is a direct response to the article I posted 2 weeks ago; one more lane won’t fix traffic. but today, we’re replacing the word lane by bus and won’t by will.
You might be thinking, won’t me taking the bus make it stop one more time, thus slowing down everyone’s commute? And you’d be right. You might think: The bus won’t take me directly to my destination, and you’d also be right. There are lots of arguments against taking the bus if you have a driver’s licence and live in not too built up urban areas. In fact, 80% of Canadians go to work using the car.
Let’s use Quebec City to put this number into perspective. About 550 thousand people live there. About 440 thousand of them drive, and 110 thousand take the bus. Seen this number, it’s easy understand why there are so many roads, which could get us to want to drive instead of being in a packed bus. But what if you actually left your car for the bus?
Your commute will take longer at first, but without these time investments, nothing will improve. Imagine if 50,000 more people chose the bus tomorrow. Initially, they’d be packed—and many would want to quit. But if you stay aboard, something happens: the city sees the demand. Within weeks, routes go from 30-minute waits to 15. New lines open to reach farther neighborhoods. Basically, the service finally catches up to the people."
A bus can hold about 40 to 60 cars worth of people. What will then happen, is less congestion for the bus, and the cars. That will then speed up both vehicles. Another thing that can be seen is transit signal priority. I won’t go in depth with this one, but basically, the light will turn green when the bus approaches is, which is going to speed it up even more.
Back to the title; ‘The bus is slow because YOU are not on it.’ That is because if you do get on it, the service will become better, faster, and serve more areas.
We can already see that happening between Laval University and the Old Quebec. Right now, you can either get on busses 800 or 801, which often are packed. Together, their frequency is about every 7 minutes, and that’s not enough. Now, Quebec City is in preparation to build a Tramway linking both attraction centers and more.
So, we can clearly see what’s happening. Busses became available, people took them, they got packed, they became more frequent, they became even more packed, tramway is in the works. The fact that one person decided to take the bus one day, multiplied by thousands of them, made it so they will soon get a better service, via a Tramway.
Thanks for getting on the bumpy bus that was this article, and I hope that after reading it, you will soon get on the not so bumpy to become bus that your city operates!