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Originally Posted by Multi-modal
I'm not saying cut service, I'm saying shift service allocation. Admittedly, OC Transpo is working with constantly fluctuating and incomplete data and it will be difficult for them to shift service perfectly as they go - but its better than sticking with a pre-pandemic service pattern that you know isn't allocating resources as well as it could be.
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Shifting service is effectively a "cut" to some areas.
The urbanist in me wants to give up on the suburbs because
we all know ridership recovery isn't going to be as significant as in other parts of the city. But altruistically that can't be done.. there are undoubtedly still people, maybe not as many, who still use connexion services, and some of those other frequent services that don't look like they're capturing as much ridership.
So long as there is a single person who uses any of those services even occasionally, reallocating that service would affect them, and in our current state that effect could be extremely detrimental to them, and future recovery of ridership.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Multi-modal
*Edit - I'll add that during Transit Commission someone asked how the transit ridership recovery has compared to the recovery of traffic volumes on City streets. Manconi answered something to the effect of "Traffic volumes have recovered in different ways, we know that traffic volumes are lower coming from the Orleans, for example, to downtown, but traffic within Orleans is still high as people are going to get their groceries and so forth". So essentially, they are seeing that change in travel patterns in personal car traffic, why are we not reflecting this in our transit system?
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Yes, we absolutely should make adjustments based on new travel patterns. I would suspect that in the future (and made easier with Stage 2) we will be gutting connexion services and implementing more frequent local service for instance.
But how exactly should that be done? Right now we'd be trying to hit a moving target, and that's really risky and could backfire (see: Toronto, and other cities). For now, I still think sitting tight until we know more is the right choice.