I’m a big fan of efficient, convenient, and frequent bus routes that access or connect common amenities. Growing up in Calgary, I made frequent use of what that city calls ‘community shuttles’, basically smaller buses that tend to run shorter closed loops in a community connecting riders to transit hubs or nearby amenities.
A Tangent on Community Shuttles
From what I hear (and I did a fair bit of research on this), the community shuttle program has been difficult to maintain in Calgary, but part of this is because ridership on some of these smaller routes is precarious, so some are being converted to full big bus routes (a good problem to have, I guess), whereas some are underused and are being cancelled in favour of an attempt at an on-demand service where you call or schedule a pickup, which will obviously take more work and probably longer overall unless your timing is known in advance and you’re a good planner.
The community shuttles still being used today are vehicles reminiscent of something like an airport shuttle, I did source a few reference pictures from a very helpful forum website, the Canadian Public Transit Discussion Board (because there is a niche for absolutely everything) or CPTDB, and some very helpful Reddit users on r/Calgary.
A Community Shuttle Streetcar?
Now, with this tool at hand, we can start to look at the possibility raised by having a vehicle like this in the OC Transpo fleet. Personally, I find accessing the businesses and amenities across the highway from my neighbourhood to be challenging outside of a car at the BEST of times. Sure, if you need to, you can do it, but if you already have a car, and ESPECIALLY if you are bringing family (kids, mostly) or multiple people, best case scenario now you’re walking a long way through infrastructure that is signalling that you’re sort of a nuisance that must be legally accommodated.
Despite the fact that there is a complete set of bus stops and shelters within a few hundred feet of the Jeanne d’Arc highway overpass, the sidewalks and crossing infrastructure is currently bolted on to what the planners already considered a perfectly acceptable design for a car-centric area. Now, this is already under construction to be much better with the LRT stop opening here next year, but there’s a real community opportunity to make this a viable, multi-modal connection bridging the two sides of the highway with safe infrastructure, with these complete street designs diving all the way into the community on both sides rather than ending a few hundred feet down in either direction and dropping you back on to a 4-lane road with narrow sidewalks.
Anyhow, along with that vision for the overpass, I think there is a great opportunity to draw people in and enable them to actually use reliable active and public transportation options, which is to run a set of local shuttles that take riders from the community (there is a clear and obvious loop I’ve highlighted below that would accommodate this, as an example). The loop has the shuttle cross the highway, loop around the roundabout at the far end, and then return and do the loop again.
A shuttle like this could run every 12-15 minutes like at a resort or large theme park, and reliably bring patrons or staff to and from the many businesses running along the strip down St. Joseph. Combine this with frequent buses along or down St. Joseph itself and there’s an opportunity here to make this street a safe, walkable destination that isn’t just filled with mostly underused parking that on average take up way more space than the businesses they attempt to support.
If you look at the map of this part of Orleans, it doesn’t take much creativity to start drawing our 5-6 other possible community shuttle routes that could run with a similar cadence, and make St. Joseph a destination like Westboro, Bank, or Elgin Street that people actually want to visit, as opposed to pulling up in a car to a specific shop, spending time buying something or eating there, and then driving away. And with linkages along these routes to the LRT, people can visit from other places in town or even from other cities without needing to rent a (VERY EXPENSIVE THESE DAYS) car.
Final Thoughts
I think the key to a program like this is to make the program affordable and incentivise people to actually use it. Maybe don’t charge on weekends for the shuttles for the first 3-6 months, and run them frequently throughout the day so you don’t even have to think about the schedule to go catch one. Get people used to thinking about it as a viable option, and worry less about a public good operating as a for-profit operation that needs to return on investment.
The bus that currently runs what this route will become once the LRT opens, the 237, literally only runs 4 times a day during peak hours on weekdays. It’s used to get downtown workers to the current LRT during rush hour, but we can do so much better. Aside from this bus, anybody in the community wanting to take public transit needs to walk anywhere from a few hundred metres at least, up to over a kilometre just to get to the nearest ‘main road’ at Jeanne d’Arc.
