[frinkprof]

Originally Posted by stevinder

Is there enough garage space for these? Equipping the buses with bike racks will increase the space required for storage. Frinkprof?

Originally Posted by MrMastodonFarm

No details but they apparently sorted out

I'm not really sure how this is going to be done, at least in the short term. There is some relief coming to the garage capacity problems fairly soon though, but likely not by the time all these new buses arrive.

There is going to be a new garage up in the northeast off Country Hills Boulevard and Stoney Trail and the Spring Gardens Garage off the 32nd Avenue North Connector is going to be expanded. Not sure on exact timelines, but both will probably be completed sometime in the next 5 years. I think an expansion of Anderson Garage may be in the offing as well.

Originally Posted by Temporary_User

Do you know how big the city is? The city is not really setup too well for cross-city bike trips on the daily.
Then transit rarely gets you right to where you need to go so riding to/from the bus/train saves quite a bit of time.

For example I work/live downtown but had to meet some friends for drinks up in Crowfoot on a Friday night (one of the snowiest too). No way I could ride my bike there after work, get there in time, have drinks, and then ride home by a decent hour.
Instead I rode my bike to the train, took that and from there rode to the pub.
Took the last train home at midnight and was home in bed at a good hour.

Yeah. There's a concept of effectively utilizing bike racks on buses that enables the cyclists to bike the first and last kilometer of their trip. That is, you put all the buses that have bike racks on the long haul crosstown routes (like the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 19, 20, 32, 72/73, etc.) as opposed to the smaller feeder routes.

The cyclists will bike to the nearest stop along one of those routes, use transit to get within a kilometer of their destination, and bike the rest of the way. That way the bus takes care of the bulk of a long trip or gets them over or around a difficult geographical feature (like the river or the Deerfoot/Nose Creek valley). If they are only going a couple or three kilometers, they will just bike the whole way.

The problem to date with making this happen is that there isn't a critical mass of buses that have the bike racks. You have to have enough buses so as to have nearly 100% coverage on these routes. If you only have enough to have only, say 60% of the buses on Route 72/73 have bike racks, that isn't reliable enough because if someone wants to use it, they have to be able to rely on the next bus having a bike rack and not to have it be a crapshoot and if it doesn't, they have to wait another 15 minutes or half an hour.

So, when there gets to be enough of the bike rack buses, what you'll probably see is certain routes picked to be bike rack routes and that's where all these will be used.