I believe that Torbram Rd is the WB stop and Cattrick is the EB stop, because there is no place for a stop EB at Torbram, and Cattrick is the nearest one, although it's halfway to Airport Rd. It's a little awkward, but can't exactly be helped.
No it isn't, the closest EB stop to Torbram is the preceding one at Vanguard. It's a 450 meter walk to Torbram from there compared to 700 meters from Cattrick. To make matters worse there's no sidewalk from either stop to Torbram. However, from the Vanguard stop there is a catwalk to Fir Tree Drive and Lucknow Drive which both have sidewalks and both lead to Torbram without much backtracking at all. Staff really screwed up on that one and I'll be writing to them about it because there's simply no reason for it.
It should be noted that there is no stop at Edwards for Transfers to the 53 Kennedy and the lack of a stop at Derry and Mississauga Road means there is no direct connection to Brampton's 51, the 58 and 60 connect at RBC however.
I strongly suggest people compare the route schedules of the 42 and 104, you can do this by going here
http://www4.mississauga.ca/planatrip/ and selecting Route Schedules. You have to select a weekday starting from April 30th. There's an option to only display stops you select to help narrow down the run times. I've added some screenshots which show WB times for the PM rush for the two routes.
In terms of WB run times in the PM, there is a mere two minute savings for the entire journey from end to end versus the 42. I laugh because I was talking to the head of Service Development back in October 2016 and when she told me they were considering express service on Derry my jaw dropped and I assured her it was completely unnecessary on a corridor like Derry because stop spacing is already quite generous and the route travels at a decent clip. This past fall I challenged Transit Planning's Team Leader and her response was that they need to provide more capacity on Derry and that if they added any more buses to the 42 they would just bunch and that's why they need to introduce a new level of route hierarchy (her exact words). Keep in mind the 42 only runs every 10 minutes and if they think they can't manage a service that runs anymore frequent than that then what does that say about their ability to manage service?
Now I don't think MiWay's planning staff are idiots, but the 104 is absolutely idiotic and I think it speaks to the dogmatic approach to service planning that comes from higher up in the organization. It seems they are only interested in adding services that they think they can market better, rather than services that will simply be more useful for everyone.
The 104 chews up a great deal of resources, it requires 8 buses and in the AM rush uses 33 service hours (average block length of 4.125 hours) and in the PM it uses 34.35 service hours (average block length of 4.3 hours). Annually it consumes 16.9 thousand hours, approximately 1/3 of the total hours being added this year. It's slightly offset by the reduction of two buses from each peak period of the 42, resulting in daily savings of 12 hours, 3 thousand annually.
To add insult to injury the 42's frequency drops down from 10 minutes to 12 minutes in the PM rush, while the 104 will run every 17 minutes and the changes come with no off-peak service improvements for the 42, all while adding excess capacity to the shoulder periods of the rush hours.
The original MiWay 5 Plan called for significant off-peak improvements for the 42 come September 2018. The original MiWay 5 plan did not include a Derry Express, but it included improving midday service to every 12 minutes (from 20), evening service to 20 (from 27), Saturday service to 20 (from 27) and Sunday service to 30 (from 36). It would appear that these off-peak improvements have been shelved.
So what could MiWay have done with the amount of hours being added for the 104? Well we could have added 4 buses during the peak periods to the 42 to get 8 minute peak service (from 10), at a cost of 3 hours per additional bus per additional period, that brings us up to 24 daily hours. By adding two buses to the midday period we could get 15 minute midday service (from 20) at a cost of 12 hours. By adding an additional bus to the evening we could get service to every 20 minutes at a cost of 5 hours. So to improve the 42's weekday service at all times, it only would have costed us 41 daily hours (Vs 104's 67.35) and thus leaving more than enough hours to bring the 42's weekend service levels with those envisioned by the original MiWay 5 Plan.
The 104 Derry Express truly is the Scarborough Subway of transit planning in Mississauga, only problem is no one is paying attention in Mississauga and how the 104 came to be in the first place is completely unclear.
