Mississauga Hurontario-Main Line 10 LRT | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx

[T3G]

That day may come. Notice of places like York Region and Durham Region amalgamated their transit into one?

Notice how each constituent town of these regions has populations that are much, much smaller than that of Toronto or Mississauga?

It's the same as why unincorporated towns fall under the purview of the OPP, but all the big cities of Ontario have their own police force.

The idea that bus route numbers are sacrosanct is pretty wild. You do realize that most people use smartphone routing to use unfamiliar transit systems, and any familiar routes will quickly be learned. Just who do you think would be deeply inconvenienced?

How about people who aren't perpetually on Urban Toronto, and might not even have caught wind that their route was renumbered, and let 50 buses of the new route go by before they might discover that the route they've been letting go by is actually the one that they want? How about people who are not good with technology, such as the elderly? How about people who only occasionally use transit, and have memorized the small subset of routes that they use? Must everyone go on the transit agency's website and check that their local route STILL EXISTS before every single outing, just so that we can pretend that Toronto and Mississauga are the same city?

If your argument is that people will get used to any changes "quickly", there is no limit to the number of absurdities you could push through. You could rename every subway station with a corporate sponsor. You could switch around the route number of every single route in the entire city. Anyone who pushes for pointless mass renumbering of bus routes is not a transit advocate, for to advocate for transit is to keep in mind that what people who use transit want is for their journey to be simple and not headache inducing. The current division has worked more than fine for many years, it works more than fine in many jurisdictions across the globe, the idea that we need to merge every transit agency in southern Ontario under one umbrella is nothing but a foamer fantasy, and like all foamer fantasies should be consigned to the bin where it belongs.

 

[micheal_can]

Notice how each constituent town of these regions has populations that are much, much smaller than that of Toronto or Mississauga?

It's the same as why unincorporated towns fall under the purview of the OPP, but all the big cities of Ontario have their own police force.

Yes, most of them are smaller populations. However, as someone that used to live in Durham Region, since amalgamating their transit, it actually got better for the cities, and for the region on a whole. There is a small town that switched to OPP as a cost savings. If we look at the duplicate service ZUM covers,or for that matter the TTC, if those could all be one service, it would serve the people better and might be a cost savings.

 

[T3G]

Yes, most of them are smaller populations. However, as someone that used to live in Durham Region, since amalgamating their transit, it actually got better for the cities, and for the region on a whole. There is a small town that switched to OPP as a cost savings. If we look at the duplicate service ZUM covers,or for that matter the TTC, if those could all be one service, it would serve the people better and might be a cost savings.

You haven't rebutted any of my arguments. Amalgamated transit agencies like DRT and YRT work (in the case of YRT, barely) because each constituent transit agency was responsible for covering a much smaller area. YRT covers a population base for a municipality with a smaller population than all of Toronto, and DRT's service mandate covers an area with a smaller population than Mississauga.

What benefits, exactly, would arise out of merging large transit agencies like the TTC, with others? Let's imagine the proposed merger of the TTC and MiWay, both of which are large cities, both in terms of population and area? Apart from the need of having to rework one agency's branding or the other's, having to redo and reprint all of their maps, wayfinding, destination sign programming, and introducing a larger area for the transit agency to worry about, thus muddying the issue and introducing the possibility that smaller local issues will fall by the wayside?

KISS principle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[micheal_can]

You haven't rebutted any of my arguments. Amalgamated transit agencies like DRT and YRT work (in the case of YRT, barely) because each constituent transit agency was responsible for covering a much smaller area. YRT covers a population base for a municipality with a smaller population than all of Toronto, and DRT's service mandate covers an area with a smaller population than Mississauga.

What benefits, exactly, would arise out of merging large transit agencies like the TTC, with others? Let's imagine the proposed merger of the TTC and MiWay, both of which are large cities, both in terms of population and area? Apart from the need of having to rework one agency's branding or the other's, having to redo and reprint all of their maps, wayfinding, destination sign programming, and introducing a larger area for the transit agency to worry about, thus muddying the issue and introducing the possibility that smaller local issues will fall by the wayside?

KISS principle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Short term pain for long term gain. Yes, at first, likely for the first 5 years it may cost more to do exactly what you point out. But, think of all the TTC routes that go into Mississauga, or the MiWay routes going into Toronto. These routes could be cut back, or realigned to make the routes better for people. May even stop forced transfers for some of them.

 

[T3G]

Short term pain for long term gain. Yes, at first, likely for the first 5 years it may cost more to do exactly what you point out. But, think of all the TTC routes that go into Mississauga, or the MiWay routes going into Toronto. These routes could be cut back, or realigned to make the routes better for people. May even stop forced transfers for some of them.

"All of the TTC routes that go into Mississauga"? There's literally one, the 52 (if you count routes which demand extra fare - if not, you also have the 900 and 952, but since there is no extra fare requirement, this is irrelevant).

MiWay has a few more routes which do go into the city, but the problems that exist with those would far easier be solved with fare integration and a new agreement to allow buses of either transit agency to pick up riders in the city, and possibly rearranging a very small minority of routes like TTC 49 and 50. There is no need to merge the two transit agencies together. It is the nuclear option. It would be like burning your house down because you found a spider in your basement.

 

[ARG1]

If that is the case, there is no need for MiWay to exist at all, right? Just give all the routes to the TTC. And then renumber them, causing confusion to tens of thousands of people in the process, because they all share numbers with pre-existing TTC services.

This is unironically a pretty good idea, and something we should be aiming for long term. The only argument I could possibly see in favour of sticking with the status quo is simply the sheer number of bus routes there are, and the amount of bus numbers we would need to avoid duplicates, but this could be solved by changing bus routes to be Letter+Number combos like we see in NYC (where each bus route is assigned a letter based off which borough it primarily travels through). This could be paired with having a consistent standard to how we number bus routes (such as universally making 9XX series bus routes expresses), or something similar to designate the various BRT routes/services.

 

[afransen]

How about people who aren't perpetually on Urban Toronto, and might not even have caught wind that their route was renumbered, and let 50 buses of the new route go by before they might discover that the route they've been letting go by is actually the one that they want?

This is trivially easy to address. Some notices posted at stops, announcements on the bus leading up to the change, a period of time using both numbers. You make it sound like bus systems never are reorganized. It happens all the time. New routes are created, old ones discontinued, routings are changed, etc.

 

[T3G]

A) In the normal world, a few routes may be reorganized at a time. How often does it occur that an entire network is renumbered in one fell swoop?

B) No one in this thread has provided any tangible benefits that would come from this. Because, of course, there are none. It is a foamer fantasy, nothing more. It would look good on a chart, and to have all buses in southern Ontario operating in the same colours. That is all.

 

[afransen]

I think you're straw-manning (no one I saw suggested all of Ontario have one set of bus route numbers), but this digression has gone on long enough.

 

[T3G]

How is it a strawman? If you merge Toronto and Mississauga's transit systems, there is no compelling argument to leave out DRT, YRT, Oakville Transit, Burlington Transit, Hamilton Transit, or Brampton Transit. Why leave it at Mississauga?

 

[ARG1]

A) In the normal world, a few routes may be reorganized at a time. How often does it occur that an entire network is renumbered in one fell swoop?

B) No one in this thread has provided any tangible benefits that would come from this. Because, of course, there are none. It is a foamer fantasy, nothing more. It would look good on a chart, and to have all buses in southern Ontario operating in the same colours. That is all.

This has nothing to do with foamer fantasy (if anything foamers like things to stay the way they are, and love to preserve existing/venerate old branding).

Do you seriously think there are no benefits to such a change? Do you seriously not see the benefit in having a unified regional network identity with consistent wayfinding and a consistent way of denoting different types of services? If you go to Vancouver, you will see that the entire metro area is unified under a single operator, where there is consistent branding and way of representing types of services. Regardless of whether you're in South Surrey or in Downtown Vancouver, all bus stop flags have a consistent design, express services are demarked in the same way (except the 99-B line for some god forsaken reason). This means that no matter where you are in Greater Vancouver, your experience in navigating the transit system will be the same throughout, and if you see a bus labelled as "RX", you know that's a rapid bus with limited stops and priority measures. To state the obvious, having a consistent wayfinding standard means that people using transit don't have to learn various wayfinding systems just to navigate the region. If we declared for instance that all express services have 9XX numbers, then someone living in Brampton travelling to York for the first time can recognize that the 988 is an express bus, rather than having to learn that in York Region, express bus routes have an E after the number.

I know I'm on record for being negative about Metrolinx' wayfinding standard, but any and all criticisms I have for the standard is related to execution and just how bad and uninspired the standard is, not the principle that there should be a standard.

 

[T3G]

(if anything foamers like things to stay the way they are, and love to preserve existing/venerate old branding)

Right, because all foamers are a hivemind who all want the exact same things?

Do you seriously think there are no benefits to such a change? Do you seriously not see the benefit in having a unified regional network identity with consistent wayfinding and a consistent way of denoting different types of services?

No, I don't see any benefits whatsoever. I see benefits in leaving every city to run its own local transit, knowing what the local conditions and parameters that they are dealing with are, and an overarching regional transit system that provides intercity connections on the level of GO Transit.

How do you expect a transit agency that is in charge of all local and intercity bus operations in the entire GTA to be able to adequately respond to all local idiosyncrasies and concerns? There's a reason why just about every nation state in the world is subdivided into various smaller, granular administrative divisions. When you understand why the federal government is not in charge of coordinating garbage collection in Vermillion Bay, you'll also understand why the same thing benefits transit.

 

[ARG1]

Right, because all foamers are a hivemind who all want the exact same things?


No, I don't see any benefits whatsoever. I see benefits in leaving every city to run its own local transit, knowing what the local conditions and parameters that they are dealing with are, and an overarching regional transit system that provides intercity connections on the level of GO Transit.

How do you expect a transit agency that is in charge of all local and intercity bus operations in the entire GTA to be able to adequately respond to all local idiosyncrasies and concerns? There's a reason why just about every nation state in the world is subdivided into various smaller, granular administrative divisions. When you understand why the federal government is not in charge of coordinating garbage collection in Vermillion Bay, you'll also understand why the same thing benefits transit.

The GTA is a unified economic and cultural hub. Yes, having a unified transit agency for all of Southern Ontario is crazy (nobody is asking to unify the TTC with GRT or Kingston Transit), but after GO Expansion you'll be able to travel from Union Station to Vaughan on the Barrie Line in just 20m. Sure, these are all technically different municipalities, but this is a closely knit and connected region where people will be regularly travelling between municipalities on regular basis, and will also be doing so on transit, in a future where car dependency will hopefully go down and people will go around the region using public transportation. To pretend that the various municipalities are somehow self serving and isolated cultural/economic bubbles is a ludicrous idea that has no basis in the modern economic reality of the region. The same is true for Vancouver as well, if not even worse since Vancouver's municipalities are typically separated with physical developmental barriers, and the region as a whole is a lot more decentralized than the GTA is (Surrey is projected to surpass Vancouver in terms of population in the near future, and most cities in the region have their own independent and major downtown cores that are far ahead from anything in the 905).

 

[T3G]

And the solution to that is to amalgamate the entire region's transit network under one operating umbrella, rather than the cheaper and simpler option of reworking a few cross border routes and reworking the agreement which prohibits MiWay and YRT from doing inter-stop transit inside Toronto's borders...?

 

[Dan416]

And the solution to that is to amalgamate the entire region's transit network under one operating umbrella, rather than the cheaper and simpler option of reworking a few cross border routes and reworking the agreement which prohibits MiWay and YRT from doing inter-stop transit inside Toronto's borders...?

I don't know if we need to amalgamate all the transit systems, but surely they should have a unified way finding standard and fare scheme at the very least.