I thought that it was time to dust off this old thread for the chestnut that started it.
It seems that the OC Transpo’s scheduled service truly is just a work of fiction.
From CTVNEWS:
Maintenance, increased congestion blamed for hundreds of OC Transpo bus trip cancellations this week
I suspect that the number of buses cancelled due to road congestion is in the minority – that most of the cancelations were due to a lack of Fleet Availability.
The article points out that the number of mechanics has been falling since 2018. This would be logical, since the number of buses has also been reduced since then. As well, OC Transpo has gotten rid of the buses that spent the most time getting repaired (or take the longest time to repair). In theory, if it was done correctly, the fleet should be made up of the most reliable buses, and just the right number of mechanics can keep 85% of that fleet ready for the road. (Based on the number of buses OC Transpo has, and the number of trips scheduled, approximately 84% of the fleet needs to be available every day.)
However, a spanner was recently thrown into the works when the City’s Auditor found that some work was being done by UNSUPERVISED apprentices. This has, likely, meant that less service can be done in parallel (mechanics doing one job while apprentices do another), since mechanics will now need to spend more time overseeing the work of apprentices.
Of course, there will always be buses that can’t complete a run, leading to a trip cancelation. In the olden days, however, a bus that didn’t show up was very annoying for those directly involved – but that was about all. Another bus came along in a bit, and the passengers boarded that one.
Now, with ‘Capacity Planning’, every bus carries as many passengers as possible. Thus, a missed bus affects a lot more people, and for longer. The next bus will arrive with few empty spaces, but some of the previous bus’s riders will cram on anyway. Thus, passengers on the second bus become disgruntled by the over-crowding. It might take a couple (or more, in extreme cases) of buses to clear the backlog from the cancelled bus. Creating bus-loads of unhappy customers.
Road congestion has always been a problem. And, as a bus runs behind schedule, more people collect at the stops ahead. It doesn’t take long before the bus is too full to take on any more passengers. This is where good management would have injected a spare bus in front of the packed one. But, alas, with zero buses in the fleet to spare, this is no longer an option. Thus, my anecdote about the # 85 leaving customers at stops from Westgate to Carlingwood, on a Friday afternoon a few weeks back. That bus was on-time, but the capacity was insufficient for the run. (Which makes me wonder whether OC Transpo actually believes itself when it says that it is monitoring bus loads and will add capacity if needed. OC Transpo doesn’t have enough buses to run the scheduled service, let alone add in extra capacity if needed.)
So here is a challenge for you: How can OC Transpo coax people out of their cars and onto buses – buses that it says will be there but never turn up because they were cancelled due to congested roads?
If a single car driver switches to the bus, on a trial basis, but bus availability and congestion are not solved, the experiment will only convince the would-by transit rider to return to the comfort of their car.
Linear Mode
