Thats all I need, is some d!ck trying to pay for his 1-way fare with his credit card.
Hopefully you can only pay for a set amount with Credit card or hopefully they have been able to work out some reduced fee with the credit card companies.
I am all for allowing someone to use a CC for a 4 + ticket purchase, but 1 ticket seems almost too convenient as to increase the costs that CT already has.
The one thing they do need to change and hopefully this does is the ability to purchase more than 1 ticket. Why that limitation is even in place is beyond me.
Perhaps Calgary Transit should start allowing payment in shillings, pence, and farthings, old chap!
I do understand what you're saying, although I'm not sure if the credit card company is paid a simple percentage, of if there is a fixed cost per transaction added as well. Regardless, until they get a reloadable card going, I have no problem paying a one-way fare on credit or debit if I don't have coins with me.
Someone still has to be paid to empty the coins from the machines, take them to the bank, and I imagine that the bank has fees for large coin deposits, etc. so it isn't as if coins don't come with their owns costs and challenges.
Location: Close enough to make a beer run during a TV timeout
Exp:
I would also say that paying with a CC is faster than somebody paying with two loonies and 4 quarters.
Also just the other day we had an extra ticket to the game, so I went to go get my buddy's kid. We scrambled to find change in the car (not knowing exactly what child fares were), and then saw the machines now take plastic. Had we known that- would have saved the search for coins.
Northeast LRT Extension from Saddletown Station to Stoney Station Functional Study
There was a functional study published in September for the next extension to the NE line that will take it to the city limits. It's incredibly comprehensive. It recommends the horizontal and vertical alignment of the line, configuration of the stations and park & ride facilities, location of the substations, an analysis of connection options to the airport, and costing estimate.
There's a lot there, but basically it can be summed up with a few major pieces of information.
Alignment
- Coming north out of Saddletown Station, the LRT would travel on the west side of 60th Street, cross 88th Avenue at-grade, curve west while ascending to go over the Airport Trail/60th Street interchange, curve back east and continue up the west side of 60th Street.
- The line will continue north along 60th Street, passing under Country Hills Blvd., go into a tunnel while curving west. The tunnel will pass under 128th Ave. and the LRT will daylight traveling west on the north side of 128th Avenue. The line will pass over Metis Trail and approach 32nd Street.
- The LRT will turn north at 32nd Street travelling along its west side and will continue north to abut the south side of the Stoney Trail Transportation Utility Corridor.
Stations
- 88th Avenue Station will be a dual-platform side-load configuration with a 500 stall park & ride. It will be located on the NW corner of 60th Street and 88th Avenue. A possible future connection to the airport will connect at this station and room has been provided for a possible spur line (although it may never happen).
- Country Hills Boulevard Station will have a dual-platform side-load configuration with a 200 stall park & ride. It will be located under the 60th St/Country Hills Blvd. intersection (much like the new 69th Street Station on the West LRT line). This station has the highest projected ridership of the extension.
- 128th Avenue Station will be along 128th Avenue about half a kilometer west of Metis Trail, within the community of Redstone. It will be a dual-platform side-load configuration. It will have a 200 stall park & ride facility.
- Stoney Station will be just south of the Stoney Trail Transportation Utility Corridor. It will be a single-platform centre-load station (due to it being foreseen to be the terminus station for quite a long time). It will have a 100 stall park & ride facility. There will be 235 meters of "tail tracks" beyond this station for storage and turnaround operations. The alignment will be built in a way such that a future extension phase would have the tracks go over Stoney Trail.
- The study recommends there be 8 substations.
Length, Travel Time, Costs, Ridership, Phasing
- The length of the extension under study is just over 7.5 km. This would take the NE line to 23 km in length.
- Overall ridership for this line is estimated to be about 50 000. By far the busiest station would be Country Hills Station.
- One-way travel time from Saddletowne to Stoney Station will be 12.5-13 minutes with a round-trip time of just over 30 minutes (after accounting for the turnaround time at the terminal station.
- The full cost estimate is $355M including a 15% contingency.
- This cost doesn't include the purchase of the additional light rail vehicles needed to service the line. Using the round-trip time, frequency of five minutes, 4 car trains and an 83% availability rate, my own guess is that 30 additional LRVs would be needed. At a cost of $4M each, this would work out to $120M.
- Breaking it up into 2 phases (the first ending at Country Hills Station) would make for roughly two equal halves of this cost. My guess is that this is what will happen.
Airport Transit Connection
- The study looked at various technologies (LRT spur, automated people-mover, streetcars, and bus options) in various configurations - mostly whether there would be a direct route to the terminal and then back out to the north central line or a connection to an airport-operated people-mover that would connect the terminal with a station along Airport Trail.
- As might be expected, a rail option of any sort was found to be incredibly expensive given the demand in the short to medium term and it was concluded that this be kept as an option but that it would be best to start with buses and monitor demand growth.
Images
This shows the alignment and station locations. The orange line from 88th Avenue Station is to show the future airport connection.
Calgary transit is so good with their train planning, and so very horrible with their busses. It's clear where all the bright lights at the company spend all their time and effort. Too bad it doesn't help me any. I need better bus routes.
Calgary transit is so good with their train planning, and so very horrible with their busses. It's clear where all the bright lights at the company spend all their time and effort. Too bad it doesn't help me any. I need better bus routes.
This definitely grinds my gears as well. One simple example is the stop I use in the morning. It has two buses, 76 and 137, both go to the Crowfoot CTrain station. They both come 15 minutes apart, and both come at exactly the same time. So if I miss the 6:54 bus, I've missed both of them, and wait another 15 minutes until 7:09, when they both pull up together. If they could offset the 76 schedule by 7 minutes, I'd have unbelievable bus service.
That's just one example of a general lack of thought that seems to go into bus scheduling. I'm not sure who does it, sometimes it feels like they've just promoted the bus driver with the most seniority...
The Following User Says Thank You to bizaro86 For This Useful Post:
Location: Close enough to make a beer run during a TV timeout
Exp:
Calgary Transit does this a lot. From my work there are two express buses that I can take; one drops me off right at home and the other a 15 minute walk away. They both come at the same time, then both again 30 minutes later.
Also the 103 and 133 come at the same time; and the 133 follows the 103 then continues onto Cranston. Back in the day when I lived in Deer Run it was the same thing with the buses from Anderson; the 29, 44 and 56 all ran every 30 minutes; all leaving Anderson at the same time.
So you have buses that come every 15 minutes and are miffed they don't come every 7?
There could be a reason on the opposite end of either route why they end up together at your stop.
My complaint isn't the quality or quantity of service I receive, more that way it's scheduled is wasteful. It seems like correcting examples like the one I gave and the one Ken mentioned could provide a significant improvement in transit service for very minimal cost. If we're paying for two buses to run, we might as well get improved frequency.
Also, route 76 has both ends at Ctrain stations (crowfoot and dalhousie) so there's no reason I can see they couldn't shift it 5-8 minutes in either direction.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ken0042
Calgary Transit does this a lot. From my work there are two express buses that I can take; one drops me off right at home and the other a 15 minute walk away. They both come at the same time, then both again 30 minutes later.
Also the 103 and 133 come at the same time; and the 133 follows the 103 then continues onto Cranston. Back in the day when I lived in Deer Run it was the same thing with the buses from Anderson; the 29, 44 and 56 all ran every 30 minutes; all leaving Anderson at the same time.
I really think improving this would increase the number of people who take transit. In your Deer Run example, the difference between a bus every 30 minutes and a bus every 10 is a huge difference in average waiting time at the CTrain station, and it would probably get a lot of people to switch from driving to the station to bussing. And some who can't get parking at the station to switch back to transit from driving downtown.
We always have debates about how we need more $$ to improve service, but issues like this go on for years, where the marginal cost of significantly improving service would be very low.
Last edited by bizaro86; 02-04-2013 at 09:29 AM.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to bizaro86 For This Useful Post:
My route, 17, was adjusted when the west LRT was brought in, and the west half of its route was made obsolete.
Calgary transit said in the lead up that busses during rush would not be affected.
Then they cut the 7:45 am bus leaving Renfrew. Last time I checked, 7:45 was during the rush. That bus was always full. Now, the 7:25 bus is packed. As is the 8:10 bus. I know people who have chosen not to take the bus anymore because of that.
What is worse, is the afternoon/evening busses. After 5:15, it is impossible to get a bus. I have waited 2:15 for a bus once. Only reason I stayed was on principle. That route is BROKEN. The bus drivers repeatedly ask the riders to complain to the alderman, as that is the only way the powers that be in Calgary Transit will actually listen. Apparently, they do not listen to the drivers at all. The drivers have said that the intersection south of the dome crossing Macleod is so difficult to get through, that it slows the route down significantly.
How can a route that runs so smoothly and efficiently in the morning run so terribly in the evening? Inconcievable.
City may look to streetcar history for future of transit
By Jason Markusoff, Calgary Herald February 16, 2013
Inner-city denizens’ dream of a Calgary streetcar system comeback could take a very, very small step forward next week.
It will come in the form of a proposed $100,000 study that’s very broad and very vague.
The senior transit planner helping plot this look into a potential “urban transit loop” said the following questions are not yet defined: what areas the loop would cover, what kind of transit mode — streetcar or otherwise — would be used, what purpose or service gap it would serve, and whether it should be a loop at all.
[...]
The study would determine the what-where-why-when of this “loop” by early 2014. Following up with a further study to determine land requirements and costs of such a broad plan would cost another $500,000 to $900,000.
Construction has begun at Rundle Station for the 4 car capacity extension. It will remain open for the majority of construction save for a long weekend closure during which the whole platform will be replaced. Here's a CBC link that gets into the broader topic of the 4 car capacity extensions.
Revised Route Ahead plan goes back to Transportation and Transit Committee at City Hall on Wednesday and is due at Council on March 4th. Then comes the most important part - implementation.
This definitely grinds my gears as well. One simple example is the stop I use in the morning. It has two buses, 76 and 137, both go to the Crowfoot CTrain station. They both come 15 minutes apart, and both come at exactly the same time. So if I miss the 6:54 bus, I've missed both of them, and wait another 15 minutes until 7:09, when they both pull up together. If they could offset the 76 schedule by 7 minutes, I'd have unbelievable bus service.
That's just one example of a general lack of thought that seems to go into bus scheduling. I'm not sure who does it, sometimes it feels like they've just promoted the bus driver with the most seniority...
I think there's some merit to this discussion, but I would think it would have to be examined much closer and comprehensively with the benefit of more data (that is either available now or might not be) than one-off anecdotes. The system needs to be examined as a whole. One thing I've been calling for a bit lately is a look at the crosstown bus system as a whole (rather than making changes to small pieces of it on an ad hoc bases or as a secondary function of studies that have looked at a specific geographic area). Likewise, there is probably a need to look at the feeder bus system. You could do it on a station-by-station basis in some areas or as a larger area in other cases (in your example, the far northwest that encompasses the catchment of the 43, 37, 137, 143 loops and all other buses) to make the system more efficient using the resources (i.e. available service hours) that are in place now.
Of course I've always said that you could simply solve a lot of issues by making increases to frequency across the board. Expensive of course, but when the frequency is 10 minutes instead of 15 (or 20 instead of 30, or whatever), a lot of the other stuff like the fact that it's a couple minutes off schedule or that your other route option isn't ideally offset tend to get drowned out.
One thing with your anecdote though that should be noted though. The 137 is a loop route, which are a bit of a different animal in terms of scheduling. While you might experience an unideal offset when compared to your other option, a person that lives half the distance to the station as you do might experience something more ideal (in this context anyway). Similar things can happen with clockwise/counterclockwise feeder route pairs where the scheduling can be perfectly offset for one person but perfectly synched (where they come at the same time, heading in opposite directions with the same travel time to the station) for another based on their stop location. Think the 55/21, the 38/25 or the 15/52. These routes in this context are basically mini loops (as in they are less comprehensive than the 37/43), but can have some of the same qualities as a pair regarding scheduling.
A couple of things about the topic in general. The "all the buses leaving at the same time from the station" concept is called a "pulse." Another thing that some might not be aware of is that many feeder bus routes are coupled with another route. That is, they will do one run as route X, travel back to the station, then switch to route Y, then upon coming back to the station will switch to route X and on again. This happens with the routes 28/83 and the routes 29/56 for example. Further, and almost entirely during the rush, are "fill" runs. For example, a single bus (and driver) may do a route 32 run, then book it up to another terminal to do a route 86 run, then off to do a partial route 73 (say from Brentwood to Chinook), and then back to the garage at the end of the rush. This is to provide augmented service that has been scheduled due to high demand on these routes at certain identified times but there is no more efficient way to provide them other than this.
I was told at a meeting with Calgary Transit's fleet manager and a senior transit planner that Transit does indeed have software that will help plan the fleet scheduling scheme (using the service scheme as an input along with assumed travel times, etc.) to minimize "deadheading" (i.e. time spent out of service to/from garages, "fill" runs, etc. That's a bit of a tangent though.
I took public transit in Ottawa with my bus/train-crazy son over the holidays and most cross-town routes had changed since the last time I took the bus regularly there (2006-ish).
Granted Ottawa transit routes are different and almost all crosstown routes (save a few specialized routes) run through downtown.
What they've done is divided many of the crosstown routes into two routes - one from the East/West/South inbound to downtown and then a separate route to finish what used to be the crosstown route. I regularly took route 85 during grad school and it was a disaster because of traffic delays. Was supposed to be every 10-15 minutes during rush but because of traffic and weather you'd have 3 or 4 arrive at the same time and then none for 30+ minutes. It really seems to have solved this issue in Ottawa. Maybe something they should consider in Calgary?
A few less WestLRT bus network changes than I'd thought. Figured there would be more tweaks after seeing how things went in practice. Changes to the 93 and 94 though.
Sorry Knalus, there are some changes to the route 17, but probably not everything you're looking for.
My take? There won't be enough tax differential to make it work. Not without diverting taxes from general revenue with some fishy accounting, anyways. (Fishy accounting would be saying Seton wouldn't develop without it, or something like that.)
My take? There won't be enough tax differential to make it work. Not without diverting taxes from general revenue with some fishy accounting, anyways. (Fishy accounting would be saying Seton wouldn't develop without it, or something like that.)
It didn't seem like there was much support from council or administration for a CRL. Like you said, it might need fishy accounting to make it work. Also, the sheer amount of money required makes it very risky.
The Following User Says Thank You to You Need a Thneed For This Useful Post:
