Frequency is what works for transit

On an evening in late December last year, I was riding the Route 11 bus with my two young kids and partner. The youngest was asleep in the stroller, his older sister was sitting on my lap cheerily telling me about her latest Christmas gift haul. We had just transferred from the 71 Arlington. I was raving to my wife about how lucky we were to have this time to sit so close to each other, to interact and make eye contact with our kids, to hold our kids as we travel from place to place. She replied, “Sure, but the only reason you’re in such a good mood is because we waited less than a minute for our transfer.”

It was true. Transferring from one route to the next on a bus trip is one of the most dreaded points of failure for transit riders — they’re often boring, sometimes located in isolated places and in bad weather they are just uncomfortable. But when they work, the whole transit experience feels different. It feels like you’re riding something closer to a world-class metro system.

Here’s the thing about transfers: if you want your city’s transit network to truly be a solution to carbon emissions and affordable transportation while convincing non-riders it’s a great transportation choice, transfers are necessary because riders can’t meet most of their transportation needs with just one route.

The trick to making transfers good is to make them predictable and short and Winnipeg’s new transit network launching on June 29 is a massive step in that direction.

The new network prioritizes service level in how it communicates the network. It identifies the primary network not just as rapid, but also frequent-express and frequent. In this way, it causes the network to begin to operate in a way you expect a metro to work in big cities. You should be able to ride the service hopping on and off between these intersecting routes with the confidence you have in a metro system.

“Now wait,” you say, “metro systems don’t run in traffic. How can a bus be counted on in the same way a metro can?” This question begins to answer another question: if frequency is the objective, why the network redesign? Why not just add more buses to the existing system?

The redesign is necessary to increase frequency across the city for a couple of reasons. In the current network, most of the candidate routes for high-frequency service converge on streets like Portage or Graham. Having a bunch of high frequency routes converging on one street would create immediate gridlock. The other major reason for the redesign is to remove left turns. Turns across traffic can be arbitrarily lengthened due to unexpected increases in traffic and a missed light cycle.

Small delays add up as late buses begin picking up passengers arriving at stops expecting to take the next bus. The next bus is now running faster because it’s picking up fewer passengers and, before you know it, two buses are running back-to-back. From a passenger perspective, this feels like unreliability. So the second reason for the redesign is to eliminate as many left turns as possible to improve reliability so that buses arrive with the regular frequency riders expect.

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This type of service does two key things: it allows riders to ditch timetables and leave whenever they like because a bus will be arriving right away. Second, it makes transfers faster. By eliminating much of the wait, trips both are faster and feel faster: researchers estimate waiting time for a bus feels twice as long as riding the bus. All of this means that instead of thinking about just the one nearby route, you can start to think about the entire network. Instead of using transit to go one place, it’s now easy to go any place you like.

When we focus on reducing waits, transit becomes as seamless as a stroll and ride. The joy of riding the bus is measured in books read; it’s in the time spent next to your kids, holding your kids, and talking to your kids face to face; it’s in the undistracted time spent with your partner. It’s in the moments of camaraderie with your fellow riders; it’s in the time spent just staring off into space rather than gripping a steering wheel in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

This type of service gets people to their jobs and to amenities affordably, and when they don’t own a car, it makes transit a competitive mode of transportation for those wanting to live in a more climate-friendly way. As a tool that moves more people using less space, it also saves us infrastructure/tax dollars.

The city, Mayor Scott Gillingham and this council are taking a bold step in implementing the new plan. This kind of dynamism is something Winnipeg needs. It’s great to see there is a large number of transit riders that know this change will be challenging but are embracing it whole-heartedly, knowing it’s time for our city be brave and to think big. With the new route network established, the next step will be to continue to increase the frequency (and the convenience that comes with it) of the primary network — an opportunity that all levels of government can and should jump on.

Joe Kornelsen was a founder of Functional Transit Winnipeg and has advocated for higher frequency transit service since 2014.