Using publicly available data, Joel Happ’s plan builds on aspects of the city’s 30-year RouteAhead plan
He’s hitched a ride on Calgary Transit countless times — and now Joel Happ has crunched some numbers that he hopes will improve the service.
Despite a recent move to Vancouver for a job opportunity Happ, a software developer, said his “heart is still Calgarian.”
Having lived in both the northwest communities of Scenic Acres and Sunnyside, Happ described them as “night and day” in terms of transit quality.
“The biggest flaw with Calgary is how our transit system fails to serve Calgarians to the best degree that it could,” Happ said.
He began cooking up ideas as to how “fixing” transit could be possible, without necessarily breaking the bank.
“If everyone is relatively close to a grid line, you just have to get to one of the lines on the grid,” he said. “You don’t have to plan anything, you just hop on.”
One of the goals is to have a bus along each route in the grid every 10 minutes or less — in line with the city’s current plan — but Happ hopes buses would run 24 hours per day.
Green Line cost overruns ‘eyewatering’
Inflationary pressures pushed costs up for the Green Line, but it’s a trend across Canada, according to Jon MacMull, communications director at the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA).
Those elevated costs can also extend to other infrastructure projects, he said.
“Because of recent inflationary pressures, people have to reevaluate the scope of projects,” said MacMull.
“All levels of government need to be flexible with their projects in order to move them forward and to build for the future.”
With the recent cost increases, CUTA is still very pleased the project is moving forward.
“It really demonstrates that all three levels of government are working together to make transit projects a reality … to make life better for Calgary’s commuters,” MacMull said.
But according to Happ, “Better transit shouldn’t cost as much as it’s costing us right now … Green Line’s important, the cost overruns are kind of eyewatering.”
‘Minor tweaks that really make a difference’
Although not against CTrain expansion or the Green Line, Happ said there’s lots that can be done without really high-cost projects.
“I wanted to focus in this plan on some basics that could be delivered and could really improve people’s lives, without being so expensive and so prohibitive,” Happ said.
His plan would see more funding for transit services, with a minimum 20 per cent service per capita increase over 2019 levels.
The City of Calgary has been working over $14 million in improvements along 52nd Street, the current home of Route 23.
One of the service’s top five ridership routes, the intention is it becomes a BRT in the future.
Happ would like to see those types of improvements applied more widely across Calgary.
Things like bus lanes, transit priority signals and queue jumps all allow for buses to move faster, he says.
“These are not major, like mega projects; these are minor tweaks that really make a difference,” Happ said.
Jonathan Lea, team lead of service planning at Calgary Transit said public engagement — especially for more complex projects — helps provide local context and input.
“It’s great to hear from the people who use a certain route every day, or a few routes every day or live in the community and know specific information about those different areas in Calgary,” Lea said.
Lea’s team is responsible for planning bus routes and working with schedulers to make sure Calgary Transit has the fleet and operators to deliver service.
In regard to people “experimenting” with the city’s publicly available data to get some real hard numbers and background, Lea left the door open.
“That’s a great exercise for anyone who loves transit, loves crunching numbers … and loves seeing our city improve,” he said.
‘Big changes’ in city’s RouteAhead plan
A 30-year strategic plan, RouteAhead essentially charts out how to expand and grow the transit network to serve the growing expectations of Calgarians — and the growing population.
“We have put forward some big changes and some big plans that we want to make for the city to improve the customer experience,” Lea said.
Part of those changes would be a “crosstown grid” with the primary transit network, similar to Happ’s vision.
“So that is frequent and fast service and it isn’t always provided by a train, it isn’t always provided on a transitway — it can also be a grid of bus routes themselves,” Lea said.
There are about 1,100 buses in Calgary Transit’s fleet, with about 2,500 operators between bus, LRT and accessible services, according to Lea.
Crosstown routes are a focus for the service now, connecting areas of the city without necessarily passing through downtown.
Lea highlighted the MAX network as an example, with routes like the MAX Orange running between Saddletowne Station and Brentwood in the north, or the MAX Teal which runs in the south.
“Each of these routes have large institutional anchors like the University of Calgary, different hospitals, Mount Royal University and the industrial area in the southeast,” he said. “They’ve proven to be very successful at helping Calgarians to get where they’re going.”
Along the primary transit network, one of the goals is to have 10-minute headways or better for buses, at least 18 hours per day, seven days per week, said Lea.
“You’re not waiting around very long for the bus to come, not waiting around very long for transfers,” he said. “So it’s really easy to get on a bus to get where you’re going and to get home again.”
MacMull said frequency and reliability are “key factors” in driving ridership up — above cost.
“Riders want to make sure that they have that frequent, reliable service to plan their day,” said MacMull.
“We’re still rebuilding, ridership is back, but it is taking a bit more to rebuild the service,” said Lea.
— With files from Scott Strasser and Postmedia