For a long time now, I’ve wanted to dedicate some time in this space to thoroughly rake out our issues with regional transit.
(That’s not to say that all issues with Guelph Transit have been resolved because those issues are systemic and seemingly beyond the willingness of people in power to correct, so they just keeping making transit free for more people in order to create a captive consumer base of predominately poor people, most of whom would be taking transit anyway.)
To fully understand why Guelph is a capital ‘C’ Car Community – despite the repeated protestations of a green constituency that definitely own at least one car – it’s key to understand the disappointing and pitiful status of regional transit options, which I will now list.
First, there’s the Kitchener Line GO Train. It can take you to either Toronto or Kitchener, and it comes every three or four hours, but only on weekdays. Good for commuters but bad for spontaneity or leisure.
On the weekends there are two bus routes into Toronto. One is a two-and-a-half-hour trip through Milton with a transfer in Mississauga, and the other is a two-and-a-half-hour trip through Halton Hills with a transfer in Brampton. Perhaps if there were room for a picnic lunch, or if snacks were offered onboard, it might be worth the trip.
There are other GO buses on weekdays with routes that pass-through Guelph on their way to either Waterloo or Hamilton. There were a lot of high hopes when this line started a few years ago, but it’s not yet been expanded to weekends, or late-night service, which, again, might help people travelling to these cities for anything other than work.
There’s the RideWell service offered through Wellington County, a successful program to be sure, but still nothing more than a municipally sanctioned ride share that basically operates 9 to 5 on weekdays. Again, good for an occasional appointment but hardly consistent. Plus, good luck booking less than a week in advance.
Heading north? You can use Guelph Owen Sound Transit, or GOST. There’s one bus there and one bus back every day. Helpful, and an example of well-run and well-developed municipal options to fill a transit gap, but it was difficult to get off the ground and it really hasn’t been duplicated to my knowledge.
And finally, there’s VIA Rail. Two trips a day east and two trips a day west. What it lacks in elegance, confidence and consistency it makes up for in sheer moxy. It’s almost a miracle that a system this bruised, broken and beaten keeps chugging along twice-a-day.
Now this seems like a good list, and in many ways, it is, but what is missing from it? An express bus route to Toronto, or any bus that connects Guelph to parts west of here beyond Kitchener, or any late-night bus service anywhere, or direct connections to Niagara, Orangeville, Barrie, Burlington, or even someplace as close as Cambridge.
Yes, Cambridge. One of the topics at this week’s planning meeting was the business case prepared by the Region of Waterloo for a GO Train that will connect our two cities, which are barely 20 minutes apart.
There’s a certain kind of madness when it comes to thinking about how there’s been no direct public transit connection between Guelph and Cambridge for nearly 50 years. When I lived in the west end, I could ride a bike from my house to the eastern edge of Cambridge in about an hour, while if I were to take public transit, even in the days of direct Greyhound service between Guelph and Kitchener, it would take three hours and nearly as many transfers between vehicles.
So the train’s a slamdunk, right? Sure, but if our experience with two-way, all-day GO service on the Kitchener Line is any indication, this will be a decades long project. While the present head of the province flirts with tunnels under 12-lane highways, his government’s been remarkably impotent in securing a few miles of track between Georgetown and Brampton that would finally realize a campaign promise made my every major party in every election for the last 20 years.
Also at this week’s meeting was the draft Downtown Height Study, and one of the underlining justifications to build higher in the area around Guelph Central Station is because parking will be less of a priority when you leave near easy transit connections. That may work somewhat if we’re talking about travelling within Guelph, but are we to take it that no one will want to leave town for any reason? Especially on the weekend?
Well, they’re not without a car nine times out of 10.
These rants about transit are meant to be stirring calls for rationality, and the first thing we have to understand is that if we’re going to make transit use competitive when compared to car ownership, then transit options need to be frequent, fair, and abundant. If you have to time your transit trip with the precision of a military assault or a space launch, you’re already turning people off because people sometimes just want to go, which was always the promise of having a car.
The promise of development free of parking requirements is empty without more regional transit, which is almost never on the front burner, and then almost always takes the form of begging Metrolinx or the Government of Ontario to do more. When area municipalities are presented with homegrown options, like the Link the Watershed plan, no one wants to be the first one to act and the idea dies on the vine.
Greyhound disappeared almost five years ago, and despite the uproar and the impact on inter-regional mobility nothing ever really came in to take its place. It’s been a profound failure on the part of local governments and their provincial counterparts who all claim to love transit and want to promote more of it without ever really doing things that make the use of transit more attractive to the people who have other options.
If the City of Guelph’s dream of high-density tall buildings with minimum parking requirements is to come true regional transit can’t just be a nice to have. We need to aware of the gaps, and we also need to acknowledge that waiting for decades for the clouds to part and deliver us trains isn’t doing a lot because regional transit is a need today, right now, and we desperately have to address it.