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ETS Bus and General Transit Improvements

Watching the latest Not Just Bikes about biking and public transit in Switzerland...those trams seem like a dream 🤯. Especially in the small cities with 100-200k people.

But back to reality, two things is all I personally want from ETS for it to be a useable service:
1) High frequency that I don't have to look at schedules and plan my whole day around bus timings, and;
2) It actually takes me places that I would want/need to go.

Okay well also maybe 3) It's safe to use lol.
 
Carrie Hotton-MacDonald
(She/Her) • 1st
Branch Manager, Edmonton Transit Service
1h • 1 hour ago

Lots of gratitude this a.m. for the people choosing transit with me. We hit our highest level of ridership recovery last week, with 84% of normal!
 
What area are you in? Does it have on demand transit?
Blatchford, no on demand transit yet.

My wife commutes downtown using transit, and ironically, the best bus for her to use is a St. Albert bus! Most other options involve walking to Kingsway Mall/109 street which is really a non starter given the awful state of active transportation along the Kingsway corridor.
Luckily I am almost exclusively WFH as my work location is 5x slower to access via transit, and the routes are so awful I would have to depart before I even have to wake up if I biked, let alone drove.
This is definitely not a unique problem for my family, when there was a residents meeting with Councillor Stevenson, another resident mentioned having to buy a second vehicle since moving to Blatchford. They previously used transit, but somehow moving closer to the core actually reduced the transit available to them.
Obviously the Metro extension opening in 2025* will change the situation, but habits are hard to break once they are formed.

As an infrequent user of transit since moving back to Edmonton, a couple of recent trips to Vancouver really highlighted just how abysmal our system is. Every trip we took required only a tap of our credit cards. If the trips taken were more than the price of a day pass, the charges were automatically capped. I don't think we ever looked at a timetable as the service was so frequent timing wasn't an issue (and I took one trip into an industrial area in North Van, not exactly a hot spot of transit usage).
 
The ETS Route Schedule and Maps page has been updated with a column for schedules starting Sept. 4, but I don't believe individual route brochures have been updated yet, as they're all showing the same timings as the summer schedule.

Interestingly, route 510X has disappeared and no other route has been inserted as a Valley Line replacement at this point; and Millgate still appears on individual route maps.
 
The 73 replaces the 510x, running on a very similar alignment as the Valley Line SE. Only misses Strathern Stop (within walking distance though), in favour of Muttart Sop, and The Quarter's stop.
The 511 is the Owl version which stops at most cross roads like a regular bus route.
 
Interestingly, route 510X has disappeared and no other route has been inserted as a Valley Line replacement at this point; and Millgate still appears on individual route maps.
Every map I checked shows Davies, both on the map and as timing points. The description on the ETS page still shows Millgate.
 
Every map I checked shows Davies, both on the map and as timing points. The description on the ETS page still shows Millgate.
Yes they did some updating overnight.

If these are the final fall schedules that are posted, there are some major cuts coming. Here are just two examples: #4 between Bonnie Doon and University down to every 12 minutes during peak (instead of every 6 last year); #5 between Westmount and Downtown down to every 15 minutes (instead of 7/8 all day). I'm assuming there are more updates to come.
 
Yes they did some updating overnight.

If these are the final fall schedules that are posted, there are some major cuts coming. Here are just two examples: #4 between Bonnie Doon and University down to every 12 minutes during peak (instead of every 6 last year); #5 between Westmount and Downtown down to every 15 minutes (instead of 7/8 all day). I'm assuming there are more updates to come.
The schedules I'm looking at for the 4 and 5 both show the stub trips you note. Indeed, the 4's are on a 10 minute headway, so 5 minute frequency between the University and Boonie Doon.

 

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