Grand River Transit

[KevinL]

Isn't the offer before the membership now? So it wouldn't be the region saying no, but the drivers.

[tomh009]

Isn't the offer before the membership now? So it wouldn't be the region saying no, but the drivers.

That's correct.

[ac3r]

They voted yes and transit should be back this week.

[panamaniac]

Any reports on the terms of the agreement?

[dtkvictim]

Waterloo Region – Grand River Transit bus service will resume on Thursday, May 11 following UNIFOR Local 4304’s vote to accept an agreement with the Region of Waterloo.

We understand that residents rely on transit on a daily basis and to show our appreciation for our customers, no fares will be collected on transit from Thursday, May 11, up to and including May 22, Victoria Day. Customers who purchased a May monthly pass before May 8 will receive a June pass.

[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.