Grand River Transit

[KevinL]

Ah, so not a wholesale replacement. I see.

[ac3r]

So it's "Pride Month" again and they wrapped another bus in alphabet iconography. For how long and how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of our dollars do they plan to keep burning to do this stuff? Same with the Every Child Matters wrap and other things. I don't really see why we're burning money on this sort of stuff given the cost of everything these days. Well, I mean I do, it's so regional staff/politicians can virtue signal in a PR and do a photo op, but I really don't understand why they think this is a good use of our money in 2025.

[Bob_McBob]

So it's "Pride Month" again and they wrapped another bus in alphabet iconography. For how long and how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of our dollars do they plan to keep burning to do this stuff? Same with the Every Child Matters wrap and other things.

Peak ac3r right here. You're the singular reason I rarely post on WRC anymore.

[the_conestoga_guy]

So it's "Pride Month" again and they wrapped another bus in alphabet iconography. For how long and how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of our dollars do they plan to keep burning to do this stuff? Same with the Every Child Matters wrap and other things.

Peak ac3r right here. You're the singular reason I rarely post on WRC anymore.

Same here. I have them blocked, but I can still see their posts sometimes when they’re quoted like this.

[creative]

Fake architect posting from their parent’s basement?

[danbrotherston]

Peak ac3r right here. You're the singular reason I rarely post on WRC anymore.

Same here. I have them blocked, but I can still see their posts sometimes when they’re quoted like this.

Me too. I blocked them after they referred to some people in our community as "vermin". I was pretty disappointed by the lack of response from the community here on that one.

I've been considering closing my account here because of this kind of rhetoric from a few members. Which is ironic because I constantly hear from them how I, and people like me, make it impossible for them participate here.

That said I'm pretty sure Bob_McBob is a mod on the Waterloo subreddit who perma-banned my account with zero justification...so...I'm not thrilled with them either.

[timc]

Improvements are set to take place at the Conestoga Mall terminal this summer:

https://www.grt.ca/en/about-grt/conestog...ments.aspx

[danbrotherston]

As long as they don't do what they did at Fairway and move the platform way away from the Mall.

[Momo26]

What's the latest on iON GRT expansion to Cambridge?

I still think if they want to go on a smaller scale, they should run it to the Amazon fulfillment site via Homer Watson. How many persons would take it to and from work there daily?

I guess that isn't something Amazon shuttle busses can't solve :/

[timc]

Won't Amazon solve it by just automating away all the jobs?

[MidTowner]

GRT delivered its Q1 ridership update to committee yesterday morning.

Ridership in the first quarter of 2025 is down 16.5% from the same period in 2024, due to reduced student populations.

Some service enhancements are recommended to be delayed to achieve cost savings. I appreciated this line from the report:

GRT’s Business Plan (companion Report TSD-TRS-25-007) is not dependent on student population growth, and prioritizes improvements to services for people of all ages and abilities by focusing on speed, reliability and ease of use.

[Momo26]

Sounds pretty multi layered. On the one hand, the system is moving a ton of students but on the other, is still needed to serve the rest of the population (despite significant decrease in student ridership).

Do we have numbers on proportion of riders that are students? And broken down to proportion that are international students?

[bravado]

Ridership goes up: pull nails and torture councillors to get some funding to support small growth in one budget cycle

Ridership goes down: start cutting everything you can, ensuring that ridership keeps going down

Transit is a service we should be investing in at all times so that we can drive ridership up naturally and not react to historically unusual student population swings. Make transit actually good and riders will appear… not the other way around.

[ijmorlan]

Ridership goes up: pull nails and torture councillors to get some funding to support small growth in one budget cycle

Ridership goes down: start cutting everything you can, ensuring that ridership keeps going down

Transit is a service we should be investing in at all times so that we can drive ridership up naturally and not react to historically unusual student population swings. Make transit actually good and riders will appear… not the other way around.

It works for the roads: we always invest in roads, and guess what? Everybody drives! The same could work for transit, as you suggest.

[MidTowner]

Grand River Transit to add Chicopee bus loop

Modest change that could be positively impactful to the lives of a few Chicopee employees, and may even grow ridership a little bit.