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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

Tristen said:
There could be, but I think taxing public (commercial) parking is enough for this time.
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Seems a little unreasonable to tax parking, while requiring a minimum amount of it. I'm not opposed to taxing parking, but we need to eliminate parking minimums first!
 
innsertnamehere said:
Now if you could carpool, that's how you can really save money..
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When you choice is the inconvenience of taking GO (with bad last mile choices and relatively slow, infrequent service) or the inconvenience of having a carpool buddy, the latter seems to make sense. I found that GO was consistently as slow as bad commutes into downtown. Except I experienced a couple 45-60 minute delays just before pulling into Union. Not sure how unlucky I am or if those are a regular occurrence. You tend not to be massively late when you drive unless the highway is completely closed. If you drive leaving at the same time you would have to to make the train, most of the time you will be early.
 
reaperexpress said:
When I lived in Waterloo I avoided the 25 local at all costs, and most other people seemed to as well. The express services, on the other hand, were great. On Fridays all the express services would be packed (every 15 minutes to Square One, and every 30 minutes to Bramalea/York) while the hourly local buses were fairly empty.

It is excruciating how slow the local branch is. I literally had a nightmare one time where I dreamed that I had mistakenly gotten on a local bus at square one and started panicking about how I was going to be trapped for two hours before the bus would get to Waterloo. Thankfully I woke up and found that I was in my bed, not the route 25 local bus.

If GO thinks that students are captive clients who will take the bus no matter how slow it is, they are sorely mistaken. From my experience, if there weren't any GO express buses running, students would seek other options like Greyhound or carpooling, or simply not travel because it would be too much of a hassle.

I can accept that the newly-extended Route 30 (UW-Kitchener-Bramalea) replaces the old Route 25F (UW-Bramalea-407) given that there's frequent service from Bramalea to Highway 407 station anyway. But they really need to bring back the 25C express from UW to Square One. I guarantee that running 1 bus per hour each on the 25 local and 25C express would generate more ridership than their current schedule with 2 local buses per hour. All while requiring fewer buses and operators thanks to the massively reduced round trip times.
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I remember my experience last summer when the only option I had to get to KW was the 25 and the 25 only at Square One mid day. This was so infuriating and then they added the Meadowvale Business Park stops for the 30 which means i can just take 1 or 2 Miway buses there, but the problem with that is… they’re Miway buses. Hopefully we could get the 25C back at least for the weekends and the 30 running also during the isolation period of the week as well.

For the weekdays however, having the 30 act as 80% of a weekday all day 25F thanks to the extension is really nice to have for the GTA connection as a whole but if we really need to transfer at Bramalea just to get down fast to Square One, on top of the 407 buses using *STEELES* to get from Bramalea-410 instead of the 407 and it’s atrocious during rush hour on this stretch. I don’t know what ML was going through when they made this routing considering that pre pandemic they just went down dixie and used the 407 to get to the 410.
 
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I took the 25 to St. Jacobs Market a few weeks ago and it was a terrible experience. First, the 21 bus from downtown was 10 minutes late because of traffic, and the connecting 25 doesn't wait for the 21. I brought my bike so I got off the bus before it did the Square One loop, quickly rode to the bus terminal, and made the 25 with literally seconds to spare.

Once I got on the 25, it was excruciatingly slow. There was tons of traffic on the 401 and the 1.75 hour trip to Laurier took 2.25 hours. By the time I biked to the market, I had way less time to spend there than I wanted. I was planning on going back on Labour Day weekend assuming express service would be in place like pre-pandemic, but I probably won't bother now since I'm not doing that bus ride again.
 
jamincan said:
Do they not plug in the second train, then? Or do they just have a really long extension cord?
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They plug the second train into the first, which is plugged into the wayside. The power draw on the wayside of the two 6-car trains together is only a little higher than a single 12-car train, and within the limits of what the wayside system is capable of supplying.

Dan
 
Curious to see that the travel time between Kitchener and Guelph has remained at 21 minutes, despite the recent higher speed testing and signal upgrades west of Guelph Central GO. Not that the two projects are related, but I'm wondering whether we'll see a reduction in scheduled travel once the Speed River bridge rehab is complete later in November. Wondering whether we'll also see VIA trim their scheduled travel times due to the recent improvements along the corridor.
 
Somehow I missed seeing this news until today. Niagara Falls one trip daily rush hour train service from Niagara Falls to Union stopping at St.Catharines, West Harbour, all stops Aldershot to Clarkson, then express to Union. Did they recently connect the two West Harbour tracks to new switches east of the station or build a platform on the mainline?
 
EnviroTO said:
Somehow I missed seeing this news until today. Niagara Falls one trip daily rush hour train service from Niagara Falls to Union stopping at St.Catharines, West Harbour, all stops Aldershot to Clarkson, then express to Union. Did they recently connect the two West Harbour tracks to new switches east of the station or build a platform on the mainline?
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No. They currently back the train out. For now, until they extend the track soon.

They did this before the pandemic too.
 
EnviroTO said:
Somehow I missed seeing this news until today. Niagara Falls one trip daily rush hour train service from Niagara Falls to Union stopping at St.Catharines, West Harbour, all stops Aldershot to Clarkson, then express to Union. Did they recently connect the two West Harbour tracks to new switches east of the station or build a platform on the mainline?
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I was at West Harbour last Friday, the rails are still very much disconnected. No sign of work being done on it either sadly
 
According to the September 2019 route 25 timetable, the 25C express service was 40 minutes faster than the 25 local between Waterloo and Square One.
According to the September 2021 route 29 timetable, it takes 30 minutes to get from Square One to Kipling via the Mississauga Transitway.

So if instead of running 2 buses per hour on the 25 local, they ran 1 bus per hour local and 1 bus per hour express, they could extend the 25C to Kipling without adding any buses to the route.
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TDE said:
Mildly disappointed with what I saw here. not so much a missed, but an ignored opportunity.
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To be fair Metrolinx has not ignored it, they've just faced lots of roadblocks such as difficult utility relocations and a lack of consensus with the track owner, CN. But yeah we really need to find some way forward with that missing link at the east end of the platforms.
 
Ideally they have the two platform tracks become one east of the station and run an extra track all the way to Confederation GO when it opens. Other than completing the bus loop the Confederation GO station isn't much to look at yet.
 
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