From the Calgary Herald – Sept 25, 2008

This fall, I made a big decision. I gave up my parking pass at Mount Royal College and decided to become a transit commuter. I came to this after some thought: it takes me 35 minutes to drive from my house to the college, and even my small, very fuel-efficient car uses about five litres of gasoline per day for that trip. Adding in parking, my commute costs me about $10 per day.

Why not cut that in half and take transit, I thought. Plus, I would be reducing my carbon footprint and I could use the commuting time to read the Herald or grade papers instead of swearing at the red car doing 80 on the Deerfoot in the left lane in front of me.

Now, I knew this would not be an easy shift. I had already made the single most unsustainable decision anyone can make — not to live close to where I work. (I am devoted to northeast Calgary and I love my job in the southwest, so that’s not likely to change anytime soon). Also, while Mount Royal can have up to 18,000 people travel there every day, transit does not consider it an important hub. The system, I knew, is designed to get people to and from downtown, and other destinations are an afterthought at best.

Nonetheless, I soldiered on. The Calgary Transit website was no help — the trip planner suggested weird permutations involving three or more transfers at places like Heritage station. After manually making schedules match up, I realized the trip — a bus, a train and a bus — would take about an hour each way.

But when I started, I noticed strange things: the buses left at times that did not appear in the schedules I printed off the web. One bus out of six in my first three days actually had the schedule for that route on board. The Teleride numbers on each stop bore almost no resemblance to the times the buses actually ran, nor to the schedules in my hand.

I waited 35 minutes in the rain for a bus that supposedly comes every 15. When I asked the driver what happened to the two buses ahead of his, he had no idea.

The bus from Mount Royal stops downtown between two C-train stations, forcing nearly all the passengers to walk two blocks.

In the evening, an empty bus pulled away from the station just as a full train disgorged its passengers, leaving them to wait 30 minutes for the next bus. My hour-long commute stretched into 90 minutes or more.

These complaints may sound trivial and, indeed, everyone who takes transit has a similar list. What surprised me is how easy they are to fix. Move the Number 18 bus stop from 1st Street to Centre Street. Synchronize the Teleride and web schedules. Supply drivers with printed schedules at the start of each shift. Revise schedules so buses leave after trains come, or simply change the incentives for drivers to prioritize getting people home, even if it means leaving the station one minute late.

The challenge is when we talk about improving transit, we discuss investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars for train expansion, not fixing the small stuff.

There is no culture at Calgary Transit dedicated to simple changes to improve the lives of its customers.

Why is that? I suspect it is because transit has never been seen as an investment in quality of life in this city. Rather, it’s viewed as a necessary evil, where costs should be minimized. That’s why the ticket machines don’t give change — they were the cheapest machines to buy. The Number 18 bus stop is where it is because there used to be a train station there. It was moved eight years ago, but no one thought to move the bus stop as well.

To be fair, Calgary Transit has posted enormous gains in ridership in the last few years and its per capita numbers are very strong. However, this growth is based almost entirely on punitive reasons — people take transit not because they want to, but because they can’t drive or can’t afford to drive.

Transit must become a preferred choice — a choice for those who have another choice. This will take a major shift in thinking in both the organization and on city council.

As for me? I’ll keep taking transit once or twice per week, on days when it doesn’t matter if I’m late. But after this experience, my next stop is the Mount Royal parking office, to buy that pass back.

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount Royal College’s Bissett School of Business. www.bettercalgary.ca

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