I was kind of hoping that the test would at least have it navigating in to both the parking lots at Spark and the Zoo. Since this is right along my commute on the Nose Creek pathway should I ride in front of it one day to test its LIDAR?
City set to launch MAX bus rapid transit lines in November
Three of the city's four new lines will roll Nov. 19; southwest BRT due late 2019
New colours and a new name, the MAX bus lines, will roll out Nov. 19, covering the southeast, north and south.
[...]
City council approved a $366,000 marketing and promotion campaign for the new MAX system last summer.
The southeast line will be purple, the north line will be orange and the south line will be, wait for it, teal.
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The city's new BRT lines — including the southwest line, which is still under construction — are expected to cost $304 million.
The southeast line is a massive project that includes a re-build of 17th Avenue S.E. between 26th Street and Hubalta Road, and three new, transit-only spans over the Bow River, Deerfoot Trail and the Western Irrigation District canal. Its price tag has been pegged at $181 million.
It will run along that stretch of 17th Avenue and connect to 9th Avenue S.E. in Inglewood.
The North Crosstown line will run between the Brentwood and Saddletowne LRT stations — with a lot of stops along the way, including the Alberta Children's Hospital and Foothills Medical Centre.
The South Crosstown route will run from Douglas Glen in the southeast to Westbrook in the southwest.
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The new name, "MAX," is meant to be a play on "maximum," as in the maximum level of service for customers. Some of the new shelters will be heated — a good thing since the buses are now set to roll on a potentially frigid Calgary day in November.
Rebranding busses and painting/wrapping them different colours seems like such a waste of money. It limits the pool that the bus fleet can draw from, should there be a mechanical breakdown and a replacement bus needs to be brought into service. But then again, do we expect anything less from this administration?
Rebranding busses and painting/wrapping them different colours seems like such a waste of money. It limits the pool that the bus fleet can draw from, should there be a mechanical breakdown and a replacement bus needs to be brought into service. But then again, do we expect anything less from this administration?
I don't think that they are actually changing the colours of all of the buses. They are just giving the lines colour names as part of the whole "we're kind of like the LRT" sort of thing that they are trying to emphasize.
Edit: I just saw in another article that they are doing a special colour on 3 buses - one for each of the new lines. Simple marketing really, and won't really create or solve any operational issues for Calgary Transit, I would imagine.
Last edited by Jimmy Stang; 09-25-2018 at 02:27 PM.
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Any word on how the new routes and schedules have been going today? Quite a lot of changes rolling out.
I don't expect to use them much or at all, but I like the new BRT routes and infrastructure. I think that it improves the transit network quite a bit and should make life easier for a lot of riders.
I am kind of curious whether the East/West line for Max Orange would actually be any faster than taking the train into and then back up again. Is this more for people who would otherwise have to take the train dowtown and then a bus to go up Centre St or something?
IMO the best thing they could do for branding for these lines is to paint the buses. I wouldnt paint them different colors but have one consistent color for the MAX lines so when people see them who dont take transit they might wonder wtf and look into it.
If all the buses are the same drab design then everyone would associate them with the same drab service they are used to.
They've wrapped the busses with the "MAX" branding and the line colours. Or, at least some of them. I don't know how often they will pull in the general long body busses for extra service. But, for some of them, you definitely will have no trouble telling if it's a Teal or an Orange line bus.
