Welcome to yet another HRM fact-filled entry, brimming with random information about the city that I found out last week, but couldn’t use in my “Ways to make the City Better” articles.
In today’s exciting episode, let us examine hypothetical buses that may or may not exist in the future.
For one of my articles, I was looking into the feasibility of running FRED the bus as a year-round service. I ended up contacting Dave McCusker, the transportation manager at Regional Planning.
I asked McCusker if he could see the city offering FRED the bus as a full-year service in the foreseeable future. His response led our interview to veer off in an unexpected (but rather interesting) direction.
McCusker does see a need in the HRM for short transit trips within the downtown area, year-round. However, McCusker doesn’t seem to think that a year-round FRED would fully serve the city’s downtown transportation needs. Instead, he brought up a project that he referred to as a “downtown shuttle service”.
If approved, the downtown shuttle service, a hypothetical transportation plan for Halifax’s future, would run year-round and primarily serve the ferry terminal, Scotia Square, Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s, the I.W.K. hospital, and the QEII hospital, McCusker says. Its purpose? “Just to have fast frequent service between those key destinations.”
McCusker said that regional planning is putting a proposal together detailing how downtown shuttle service would work, and how much it would cost. The proposal will be part of a presentation to council for the upcoming budget year, he says. Council will be examining the details of the project “probably early in the new year”.
McCusker says that a downtown shuttle service would give the existing buses and ferries better connections to universities and hospitals, thereby making the entire transit service more useful. As well, such a service would reduce people’s dependence on cars while downtown. “They could use the transit system internally within the urban core, to get to where they need to go.” As such, people would feel more comfortable about leaving their cars at home, McCusker says.
McCusker isn’t sure yet how much the shuttle would cost for passengers. He says that if council is interested in the service, they will have to decide how much they’re willing to pay to operate it each year. If the service were to be free, like FRED, its operating costs would be higher. As well, McCusker points out that most of the people using such a service would theoretically be transferring from other Metro Transit units—ferries and buses—in which case, the actual cost of riding the downtown shuttle bus itself wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
Even if the plan is approved, McCusker says it will still be at least another couple years before the city sees a downtown shuttle bus service in action.
This theoretical bus also wouldn’t necessarily preclude the city’s need for FRED. McCusker says that to some degree, the downtown shuttle service would overlap with FRED, but that the two services have different goals, since the new bus would be geared towards serving areas that employ many people (such as medical offices, hospitals, office towers, and universities) and FRED is used primarily to access businesses. They’d also be traveling slightly different routes. “I don’t think the downtown shuttle service quite captures the same targets as the FRED bus would, so there’s probably a place for both of them,” McCusker says.
However, it seems unlikely that the city would decide to support the downtown shuttle bus service, and still be willing to even entertain the idea of extending FRED’s service year-round. It seems like an either/or proposition. At the same time, no steps are being taken to extend FRED service now, either, and the proposed downtown shuttle bus service actually sounds even more useful than FRED.
Still, it’s possible that the year-round downtown shuttle bus service would still not solve one of the problems that a year-round FRED would correct. FRED is currently the only bus that travels to the Pier 21 area, which means that winter Pier 21 enthusiasts have to hoof it when traveling to the museum. McCusker says that, ideally, the downtown shuttle service would serve the Pier 21 area, but there are problems associated with doing so. Pier 21 is essentially on a dead-end street, he says, “it’s not a destination we can serve on the way to somewhere else.” Serving Pier 21 would entail taking many passengers out of their way, to serve a select few.
He says that he’d like for the service to travel to Pier 21, particularly given that new NSCAD facilities also in that general area, but the area “is a difficult one to work into an efficient routing.”
Either way, the downtown shuttle service plan certainly sounds like a positive step for the city, so here’s hoping that it gets approved.
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2006.