Move towards a bus rapid transit system
October 20, 2006

A small step towards a Hamilton bus rapid transit cleared the public works committee this week when councillors accepted a recommendation from the transit master plan steering committee to move the city's only express bus to an all-day service next year.

The popular Beeline express bus operates between McMaster University and Eastgate Mall with some extensions into lower Stoney Creek. The 33-minute ride compares favourably with driving speeds, but the service is currently only provided during morning and afternoon rush hours on weekdays.

Under the proposal adopted on Monday, the every-ten-minute service will be extended through the mid-day period and into the evening – running continuously from 6 am to 9:30 pm. The transit committee selected this improvement over an option to moving the service to every 7.5 minutes during the rush hour periods.

The McMaster-Eastgate corridor is the most heavily used in the HSR system, with demand exceeding capacity by at least 50 percent for much of the day – resulting in overcrowding and numerous times when passengers are forced to wait for later buses, despite the addition last year of three new buses serving the university.

The newest changes follow a city decision last month to buy bigger buses for the corridor – replacing some of the standard 40-foot vehicles with 60-foot articulated (bend-in-the-middle) buses. Those new vehicles will also arrive in 2007 and will have a distinctive paint job as an initial step to developing a bus rapid transit (BRT) system that would feature faster transit along major city roadways.

The Beeline was set up in 1989 and was expected to be followed by other express bus services. Instead, service cuts and fare hikes slashed transit use in the 1990s, dropping annual rides to below 20 million from a near 30 million level in 1985. The slide has been slowly reversed in recent years, but Hamilton's transit growth still lags far behind other major Canadian systems that are registering growth rates exceeding three percent a year.

Bus rapid transit is being widely adopted in North America as a lower-cost alternative to subway and other rail transit services. A Hamilton BRT is a central recommendation of the city's draft Transportation Master Plan developed by IBI consultants and unveiled in two mountain open houses last month.

Brian Hollingsworth of IBI told the transit committee earlier this month that the preferred solution “really hinges on aggressive transit expansion”. In addition to the McMaster-Eastgate corridor with potential extension all the way to Winona, the proposals call for establishment of a north-south express service from the waterfront to north of Rymal Road using James and Upper James. An east-west mountain route is also under consideration, with current thinking favouring a bus corridor along the Lincoln Alexander Parkway .

“Transit is only going to work if the city gets serious about compact mixed-use development around transit nodes and corridors,” Hollingsworth told the committee. Pointing to the city's commitment to the Red Hill Creek Expressway, he said “I think if the city put those sorts of efforts into the BRT network, it would result in something fantastic.”

The recommended changes to the Beeline service are subject to a final decision at city council on the 27th of this month. Then the new city council which will get the final say on whether the costs can be covered within next year's budget.

Funding for the Beeline changes, and several others recommended by the transit committee, would at least partially be drawn from gas tax revenues that have been made available to the city by the provincial and federal governments for the specific purpose of improving public transit.