I bought two Pan Am tickets to watch Karate this Friday evening. The venue is Mississauga Sports Centre (also known as Hershey Sports Complex), which opened in 1998 and is described as "Mississauga’s flagship sport and recreation facility" and "one of the premier sports and entertainment facilities in the GTA". So when I check the address to see where it is, I find out that it's in the middle of an industrial park. Who is the genius that thought it's a great idea to put it here?
Without the Pan Am games this venue is accessible by two infrequent bus routes that only operate off-peak (on weekends it's only one bus route, and it doesn't go to Square One). No matter where you commute from it easily takes well over an hour or two to get here by transit, and probably several buses. There is no train station or major bus terminal nearby, but in Mississauga they always make sure to provide maximum driver convenience by having lots of surface parking and locating everything next to a highway. Since I'm not a driver, all I get is a little pole where I can wait a long time for the bus while gazing at butt-ugly suburbia and high speed traffic. There's not even a bus shelter, bench, route map or schedule, but that's par-for-the-course in this city.
With that being said, I went on google maps to see what's the best way to get there from downtown by transit. Looks simple enough; just take the Lakeshore West train and then transfer to bus 95 which is a special Pan Am limited-stop express route. I wanted to use the Milton train instead and then transfer to the 95 so that the bus ride would be a lot shorter, but this bus doesn't stop at Cooksville GO. It only stops at Port Credit --> Square One --> Mississauga Sports Centre, so I have no choice but to take the longer route.
Then when I checked the bus schedule I was even less impressed. On weekdays, trains arrive at Port Credit 10 minutes and 40 minutes after the hour. However the bus runs every 30 minutes all day, and it departs Port Credit more than 20 minutes after a train has arrived. In other words, no matter what time I get off the train at Port Credit, I will have to wait over 20 minutes for the bus to depart.
If there was any coordination going on, it shouldn't even take 10 minutes to do the transfer. At Aldershot GO station for example, it always takes just 8 minutes to transfer to a GO bus toward Hamilton. I'll report back on how well it goes, but given how infrequent the bus is I expect it to be super crush-loaded when my train arrives with a bunch of people, and even more so after the event when 5000 people go home at the same time. Miway should learn from the TTC on how to run proper bus service during the games:
If this is the best MiWay can do during the biggest ever sporting event in the GTA where everybody is being urged to take transit, then this city will continue to have a crappy transit system for a very long time.