Grand River Transit

[ac3r]

For making everyone's week hell, GRT will make it up to you by letting you save a few dollars: https://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/Modules/...e0d77495e5

[tomh009]

They voted yes and transit should be back this week.

Back on Thursday. And with 11 days riding fare-free (or a free month if you are on monthly passes).

[bravado]

I don’t know about you guys but there were a surprising amount of cyclists out on the boring industrial area MUT today in Cambridge - I have a theory that they’re doing it while GRT is striking.

[nms]

Does the fare-free transit also include the Ion?

[KevinL]

Does the fare-free transit also include the Ion?

It does.

[ac3r]

Does the Transit app very often say GRT realtime info unavailable for anyone else? I guess I still have backed up data maybe because it actually does work, but I always see that message when I open the app.

[KevinL]

Yeah, I keep seeing that popup despite the data actually being real-time. I presume it's a bug of some kind.

[Bytor]

You canlt have backed up data for real-time info by definition. The Transit app does, however, fall back to posted schedules when the GTFS-RT feed for a transit agency is offline.

[dunkalunk]

So, attended the route 2 and 73 cancellation public information session on Zoom. Less about Route 2 since it seems that those concerns had mostly been addressed with the extension of route 34 through downtown, down Stirling/greenbrook and to Sunrise Centre. Lots of personal arguments for why 73 should have been kept and lamenting that 73 never got a "public consultation" before the decision had been made. I raised my hand and reminded people that if they care about transit, then they need to be reviewing the budget and attending planning and works to delegate. We'll see if the recording ever gets posted.

[Bytor]

I raised my hand and reminded people that if they care about transit, then they need to be reviewing the budget and attending planning and works to delegate. We'll see if the recording ever gets posted.

That's a little unfair, I feel. It takes a lot of time and effort to stay up to day on council sessions, budgets, and the like, and not everybody has that time and flexibility to do so so.

All of us here, on this bulletin board, we've essentially made a hobby of urban planning and related subjects and we sink multiple hours per week reading email lists from municipalities, on engagewr.ca and other municipal websites, and so on, and that it took us years of building up the knowledge we do have so that we know what to look for and where to look to help short-circuit the process.

It's one thing to mock a person who is too lazy to google an easily findable thing like the list of city road closures and book mark it for later use, but it's ridiculous to say that they can only share at these info sessions if they did they highly in-=depth activities you mentioned.

This wasn't just as some tweak of a few stops on a route, like gets done every season, or even a shifting around of routes that still ends up with the same basic coverage. It was a deletion of an entire route with no corresponding realignment to keep coverage, had no public consultations to to determine community effects or desires, just a bunch of demographic assumptions and an announcement out of the blue.

People should not have to be reading budget documents or zealously reviewing every P&W committee meeting to have found out that a significant service cut like this was being made.

[KevinL]

 those concerns had mostly been addressed with the extension of route 34 through downtown, down Stirling/greenbrook and to Sunrise Centre

First I've heard of this solution, is there more detail available somewhere?

[dunkalunk]

@Kevin L https://www.grt.ca/en/about-grt/plans-an...djustments

It was mostly a call to action. There were some people who were resorting to ad-hominem attacks against the presenter when they really need to be directing their anger at council, delegating at counsellors who approved the route cut. I don't necessarily blame people that they weren't informed. GRT also did a very poor job of communicating this before the budget approval.

[jeffster]

So, attended the route 2 and 73 cancellation public information session on Zoom. Less about Route 2 since it seems that those concerns had mostly been addressed with the extension of route 34 through downtown, down Stirling/greenbrook and to Sunrise Centre. Lots of personal arguments for why 73 should have been kept and lamenting that 73 never got a "public consultation" before the decision had been made. I raised my hand and reminded people that if they care about transit, then they need to be reviewing the budget and attending planning and works to delegate. We'll see if the recording ever gets posted.

In all honesty, who has time to do that? Certainly no one here noticed that these routes were going to be cancelled, as there was no mention of it until the GRT posted that these routes were being cancelled. It's also silly to expect people to attend every budget session just in case it might affect them. Obviously the intent is to withhold information from the public, otherwise they would have mentioned to the public that during a budget process on this date they'd be discussing changes and cancellation to certain routes. This didn't happen.

We're in the Route 2 area. This entire route has suffered for 5 of the last 6 years without full service March to December because of roadworks because the city is too damned stupid to figure out how to do a job in one go rather than 6 years. Route 2 has been around forever, and certainly not a route you'd expect to be totally cut.

Either way, very few people have the time and energy to attend all of these meetings. This is especially true when these meetings go late into the evening, and you might not have transit to take you back home. Route 73, for example, last run is at 6:15. Anyone relying on that route is going to be walking home if they want to attend a budget session. Route 2's last run is at 9:08, so ditto on that. As for using Zoom, not everyone has a good internet connection (if at all), nor know how to use it.

That is why the GRT and the Region need to communicate with residents the things they have in mind. A simple mailer would be inexpensive, and would have given them the feedback need and perhaps save them the embarrassment of how stupid they are when making decisions.

[ac3r]

But by not informing anyone they get what they want.

[Bytor]

@Kevin L https://www.grt.ca/en/about-grt/plans-an...djustments

It was mostly a call to action. There were some people who were resorting to ad-hominem attacks against the presenter when they really need to be directing their anger at council, delegating at counsellors who approved the route cut. I don't necessarily blame people that they weren't informed. GRT also did a very poor job of communicating this before the budget approval.

That GRT webpage doesn't include the route replacement option, only the cut.

https://pub-regionofwaterloo.escribemeet...2#page=115

TSD-TRS-23-006