Jeremy Finkleman, a big name in Canadian transportation planning, was riding around town on the Sault College #4 bus earlier this week, observing with the keen eye of an expert in transit analytics and planning.
Finkleman is the lead consultant with the National Transit Centre of Excellence, run by global professional services giant WSP.
Last November, city council awarded a $159,421 contract to WSP Canada to conduct a review of Sault Transit operations.
Among other things, WSP has been directed to make recommendations on whether to retain the existing downtown bus terminal on Dennis Street or move it elsewhere, whether to expand on-demand service and how to address those times when the number of riders exceeds available bus seats.
A presentation made by Finkleman on Tuesday night at the Ronald A. Irwin Civic Centre suggests he's already caught on to a number of issues that have long irked critics of local bus service.
These issues include the lack of direct connections to move smoothly from one location to the other, lack of connections between many bus stops and the sidewalk network, low ridership on the community bus and complaints about the on-demand service.
A SooToday review of recommendations made by WSP to other cities also suggests the consultant has a decided preference for multimodal transportation hubs and is likely to suggest a broad vision for transit-oriented development with additional implications for city planners and housing priorities.
"Concentrating population density around transit is smart planning. It provides access to places to work and play without ever setting foot in a car, reducing people’s daily carbon footprint," said a recent WSP report.
"But transit-oriented development (TOD) goes far beyond building condo towers next door or on top of a transit hub. It represents an opportunity to build a complete community, in which people to have core amenities within walking distance of home, safe passage throughout the community using active transportation methods, and an expansive network of options for navigating the rest of the city.
"Successful TOD requires careful, purposeful design and planning at the earliest stages of development," the company said.
The following are selected excerpts from Finkleman's presentation this week to a drop-in information session at city hall:
The real experts
Who are the real experts? It's not us from Toronto, it's you guys.
It's the users of the system, and we need to be sure, as we are moving forward, that the transit system works for the operators and for the users, and that it's getting you to where you want to be as quickly as as possible, in a cost-efficient manner.
About the study
So what is the transit optimization study?
Well, the study provides an opportunity to take a look at the way the transit system functions today.
We will be assessing the effectiveness of the current bus routes and on-demand services. We also want to hear about how the current routes have evolved, and understanding whether that system, in its evolved form works better or worse than prior iterations that have been here in Sault Ste. Marie.
Critically, we'll also be evaluating the potential relocation of the Dennis Street transit terminal and its impacts. This is a ongoing stream of work that the city has been involved in for several years now. There is a desire, from an operational standpoint, to take a look at the impacts of that relocation through this study.
We're about one-third of the way through the study.
Once we hear from you, and we understand from a user perspective as well as from a technical perspective, we're going to go to the drawing board. And that's when the fun stuff begins for our team.
We will be taking a look at a range of different thematic options to improve the service, and we'll be drilling down to essentially a short list of three potential improvement options. We'll then come back to you at that stage with those potential options, and again, we'll want to hear from you. What did we miss? What makes sense with these potential options? What doesn't make sense? What should we refine further?
So that's our next touch point, and that next touch point will be in June, and hopefully I'll be able to experience your beautiful city with nicer weather.
Coming out of all of this, we will be drafting a five-year transit optimization plan and a 10-year high-level transit management plan.
Essentially, what that means is we'll be deciding how the network should change, or how elements should change over the next five and 10 years, how much those changes are going to cost when new buses need to be purchased, if a system expansion is happening and to schedule that in over a 10-year period.
How the Sault moves
The vast majority of people here in Sault Ste. Marie drive their cars and either travel as a driver or travel as a passenger.
Indeed, over 90 per cent of trips to work, according to the last census, are made in a vehicle.
Transit occupies three per cent.
That might seem low, but in reality, this share that is transit has been growing recently and over the coming years, if trends continue, will continue to grow.
In terms of overall ridership over the past six years or so, you can see a significant drop as a result of the COVID era.
And this is not unusual to Sault Ste. Marie. This indeed was very common across the transit industry as a result of COVID and the related restrictions.
What isn't as common, however, is to see the rebound that we've seen here in your system as an after-shot of COVID.
What we've seen here is that your system has almost entirely, and then some, regained its pre-COVID ridership.
Your system now serves over 1.9 million trips per year.
What this means on a day-to-day basis, on a typical weekday you have about 8,500 trips occurring on the transit system.
The ridership has fully recovered post-pandemic and is now at record levels.
Ridership is heaviest during the mid-week, peaking at about 8,500 passenger trips per day.
This means that for every hour of operation, every hour that the bus is operating, about 23 passenger trips are being accommodated on your system.
When you take a look at other systems, similar systems of similar size, it's a pretty favourable metric.
Who's on board?
I had the pleasure of riding the system yesterday, and certainly saw a cross-section of society on the [bus] system.
I think one of the more defining groups that I did see are post-secondary students.
There were a lot of post-secondary students on the bus.
And indeed, when we take a look at our fare breakdown, a lot of that fare comes from the unlimited student ride passes issued by Algoma University.
There's a lot of people coming from Sault College as well.
There's also adults, people who pay with cash fares. Seniors are on board, youth and children. So a broad cross-section.
How's the system being used today?
No surprise for system users, but our busiest stop in the system is the [downtown] terminal. The terminal sees over 2,000 boards every single day getting on at that terminal.
And when you think that there's about 8,500 trips per day that are being taken, almost 2,100 is starting at that terminal is a very important part of your network.
I've noted the top 10 stops [see graphic presentations in the photo gallery at the top of this article].
What's interesting, and this is a little bit different from some other transit systems that we evaluate, is that there's maybe three or four or five very-heavy-use stops.
The next one is Algoma University. Around 550 people get on there every day.
The northern transfer hub, about 500 people get on there.
Five hundred to seven hundred get on at the Food Basics.
But once you get past stop number seven or so in the top 10, it drops below 100.
Sault College bus has most riders
So this is showing us that your ridership is fairly dispersed, and when we later break that down route by route, it's interesting to see that Routes 4 [Sault College] and 5 [Riverside/McNabb] have the highest number of users, followed in close succession by Route 2 [Great Northern Road].
The amount of people that are onboard Route 4 comes out way ahead.
Route 4 is your busiest route in the network, and I had the pleasure of riding it yesterday to just see the degree of turnover and number of people that are getting on that route.
On the other side of things, the community [bus] has very low relative ridership, I think about two-and-a-half or three per cent. So there's, there's perhaps some rethinking that needs to be done around how these routes are prioritized.
Indirect connections
In terms of gaps and opportunities, your network is coverage-oriented, which is quite typical of smaller communities.
The system connects all key locations in the Sault but those connections may be indirect.
The routes are designed to intersect at Dennis Street, which allows for the maximum connectivity between the routes.
This type of system layout has its advantages in that most of the urban area of Sault Ste. Marie is well covered, but it also has its disadvantages in that it may be relatively indirect to get from one location to another, with people perhaps finding that taking the bus between two locations can take as long as three, four or five times what it would take to drive.
So these are sort of the trade-offs that you get with a coverage-oriented style system.
People waiting for buses in a snow pile
In terms of other gaps, as I've driven around the community and explored, there are a large number of stops that are simply not connected to the sidewalk network.
Driving around yesterday, I saw a lot of people waiting for the bus in a snow pile.
I saw a lot of people sort of struggling walking along the side of a busy road to get to a bus stop.
This is a problem, because when we talk about transit, there's four components ultimately to a transit trip.
The first component is, how do you get from your origin to your first bus stop? Typically, it's walking.
Your second step is your waiting experience at the bus stop? Is there a shelter? Is it comfortable? Is it warm?
Your third of the four steps is your actual ride on the bus and your fourth is, how do you get from your destination bus stop to your final destination?
If those four elements are not thought about systematically, there's going to be issues with your transit trip.
And indeed, what we're seeing is that a full 29 per cent of your bus stops are not connected to the sidewalk network, which creates issues for everybody, but especially for people with physical disabilities. And this is a very, very serious issue.
Complaints about on-demand services
In terms of on-demand services, I've been speaking to a lot of people, and we started to hear about on-demand services and how they're going.
As you know, the on-demand services were introduced during the COVID era, in periods of much lower ridership.
They served their purpose when they were introduced, originally on Sunday.
Since being introduced in the COVID era on Sunday, your system ridership has grown significantly and the on-demand services have been transitioned to Saturday evening as well as Sunday evening.
It's been made aware to me that there are some issues with this. There are some issues around reliability, people getting home from work, critically after seven o'clock on a Saturday or a Sunday. Not being able to get folks to where they need to get to in a reasonable time.
So we're very interested in hearing more about your experience with on-demand services. Perhaps some have positive experiences. I've heard a lot of negatives so far, but perhaps there's some that are positive.
Para bus
Another vital service offering, is para bus. Sault Transit's para bus service provides curb-to-curb, public transit service for persons with physical disabilities and vision loss.
Some of the things we've already heard is that bookings can be made up to two weeks in advance and are made on a first-come, first-serve basis, but if those bookings aren't made sooner rather than later, those spots can fill up.
So we've asked some questions. How can para bus be improved? Are you able to secure a ride when you need one?
And also separately, what types of improvements to the conventional system could be made?
Downtown terminal
In terms of the downtown terminal relocation, it will be looked at as part of this study.
The city is quite specifically exploring relocating the existing downtown terminal to the transit centre located at 111 Huron Street, which is about five blocks to the west.
As has been reported in the past, the current terminal continues to experience challenges, security and otherwise, and there are some opportunities to reduce both capital and operating costs as a result of a potential relocation.
So we're going to be exploring this from an impact on routes perspective.
We at WSP, we're critically interested in hearing from you, the users, how would relocating the terminal impact the way you use the system?