Tag Archives: public transit

Notes on the Downtown LRT Connector Concept Plan

By Mack D. Male ·

On Tuesday evening the proposed Concept Plan for the Downtown LRT Connector was presented to the public at a very well attended event. The plan is the next step in the process that really kicked off on June 21 when City Council approved a street-level downtown LRT route. The proposed 2.1 km route will serve as a connector for the future West and Southeast LRT lines, with 5 stops and opportunities for transfers to the existing LRT system in the downtown core. The route runs primarily along 102 Avenue, connecting to the West LRT via 107 Street on 104 Avenue and to the Southeast LRT on 102 Avenue near 96 Street.

The Downtown LRT Connector was mentioned as a catalyst project for the Capital City Downtown Plan more than once. It forms an importance piece of both the six-legged LRT Network Plan and the so-called Downtown-University circulator.

Here’s what it looks like (the purple line):

Downtown LRT Connector

The Downtown LRT Connector will use low-floor LRT vehicles, which is the style all future LRT development will use (when possible). Low-floor LRT requires less infrastructure and enables step-free, street-level boarding. And yes, low-floor LRT will work in our winter climate!

Downtown LRT Connector: The Quarters in Winter

There are five proposed stops along the route:

  1. Campus Stop – Located diagonally between 108 Street/104 Avenue and 107 Street/102 Avenue. Land acquisition would be required, including the AADAC building. Potential for development around the stop. Serves MacEwan and NorQuest. Features a third track, which could be used as a staging area to prepare for large events, etc.
  2. 105/106 Street Stop – Located in between the two streets, where there are currently parking lots. Land acquisition would be required.
  3. Centre West Stop – Located across from Manulife Place, in between 102 Street and 101 Street. Requires no land acquisition. Would feature dedicated bicycle lanes in both directions.
  4. Churchill Square Stop – Located across from the Stanley Milner library. Requires no land acquisition. A second set of escalators/elevators would be built on the northwest corner of the 99 Street/102 Avenue intersection. Easy connections to existing LRT.
  5. Quarters Stop – Requires no land acquisition. Some traffic impacts: 102 Avenue at 96 Street would be closed to through traffic, and a single eastbound lane would be provided from 97 Street to maintain local access.

Here’s a rendering of the Churchill Square stop:

Downtown LRT Connector: Churchill Square Stop

The question & answer session covered a lot of topics. Here are a few notes I took:

  • The Downtown LRT Connector would use a different signal system. Rather than an exemption (the current LRT always has right-of-way) the LRT would receive priority, but may hold at stations to allow traffic to clear.
  • Buses that currently run along 102 Avenue would of course be re-tooled to feed into the LRT system.
  • The bicycle lanes in the concept plan are primarily shared lanes, but there’s the potential for dedicated lanes in the future.
  • The location of the Quarters stop is further west than would be ideal, but as it dives into an underground tunnel to join the Southeast LRT there isn’t much flexibility. There are significant grade changes.

I also asked about the City Market, as the route would run right through the middle of it. I was told that the City has already had conversations with the City Market, and that they’re confident they’ll make it work (either spreading out along 102 Avenue a little more, or potentially just leaving everything the way it is…but with a train running through every 15 minutes).

I’m particularly excited for this route, living at 104 Street and 102 Avenue. It’ll mean I’m a block or less from both the existing LRT (at Bay/Enterprise Square) and the new lines (at 105/106 Street). Can’t wait to see it happen!

You can download the Downtown LRT Connector Information Booklet here (PDF).

The Concept Plan will be presented to the Transportation & Public Works Committee at a non-statutory public hearing on December 8, after which it will be forwarded to City Council for review in January 2011. You can check out the Downtown LRT Connector page for more information.

Edmonton Transit in 2009

By Mack D. Male ·

I think 2009 was a very interesting year for transit in Edmonton! There were a number of big successes, such as the launch of trip planning with Google Transit, new LRT cars, the opening of the South Campus LRT Extension, experiments with dedicated bus lanes and smart cards, the release of data for developers, lots of support for transit to the Edmonton International Airport, completion of major construction on the South LRT extension, and of course, the approval of the NAIT, West, and Southeast LRT lines. There was also some sad news, such as the violence against bus drivers and other security issues. And finally, some transit news from 2009 is either positive or negative depending on how you look at it, such as the end of trolley buses.

TransitCamp EdmontonSouth Campus LRT Grand OpeningSouth Campus LRT Grand OpeningMack & DonETS PlatinumMy Bus StopWest & Southeast LRT Announcement

Here are some of the transit-related headlines from 2009:

Also: you can see the monthly In Transit newsletters here.

Some data points for 2009:

  • The 15th annual Stuff A Bus campaign collected 31,000 kg of non perishable food items, and $17,000 in cash donations.
  • On February 1, 2009, the price of an adult monthly pass rose $7.75 to $74.25.
  • In its first six months of operation, 311 fielded 116,437 calls related to trip planning, 63,980 calls related to bus information, and 6,037 calls related to transit fares. Transit was the most commonly requested service.
  • ETS Statistics and ETS Statistics for 2009 (will be updated).

TransitCamp Edmonton Competition

At the TransitCamp Edmonton event on May 30th, it was announced that ETS was releasing route & schedule information in the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format for everyone to use. We decided to hold a small competition, to spur interest in developing applications that made use of the data! The competition closed November 30th, and I’m happy to finally share our two winners:

  1. MyStops by Grayscale Apps
  2. ETS Trip Planner by Waclaw Lany

MyStops, as you probably know, is a very popular iPhone application that gives you quick access to the schedule information for your favorite bus stops. Waclaw’s trip planner combines the stop number functionality of the official ETS Trip Planner with Google Maps routing.

Our judges, Councillor Don Iveson and Edmonton CIO Chris Moore, evaluated the submissions using three criteria:

  • Usefulness to residents
  • Visual appeal and usability
  • Inventiveness and originality

Congratulations to Andrew, Sinan, Sari, and Waclaw!

2010

This should be another big year for transit in Edmonton. The last of the old GMC vehicles were retired in 2009, which means that ETS is now running a 100% accessible fleet. The South LRT extension is scheduled to open in April, and construction on the North LRT extension has begun. The U-Pass pilot ends this year, so a new deal will be negotiated, and NAIT students might get to join. And hopefully at some point the trolley wires will be completely removed! I can’t wait to see what else 2010 has in store for us.

Don’t forget: the Donate-a-Ride campaign is on until January 31!

Keep up-to-date on the latest transit news and announcements on Twitter using the #yegtransit hashtag!

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments or via email.

Talking Tech with Edmonton Transit (ETS)

By Mack D. Male ·

I was fortunate enough today to chat with Bruce Beecher and Dennis Nowicki from Edmonton Transit (ETS). Bruce is the IT Strategic Advisor for the Transportation department, and Dennis is the Director of Community Relations for ETS. Though we talked about a variety of things, the focus was technology.

I think there was some educating happening on both sides. I learned more about their situation and perspectives, and I hope they soaked up some technical stuff from me. I think it went really well!

What I’d like to share in this post is an overview of what we discussed. There’s nothing confidential here, but some of this information may still be new to you. They’re aware they need to improve on the communication side of things!

ETS has been evaluating potential technologies to deploy to the fleet for quite a while now (I wrote about some at last year’s Community Conference). These technologies include:

  • Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) – This is essentially a GPS module that would be installed on each bus.
  • Automated Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) – This is essentially giving riders access to that GPS information. That is, where is my bus right now?
  • Mobile Data Terminals (MDT)
  • Automated Stop Announcement (ASA) – No more peering out into the darkness to see if you’re at the right stop. Also important for accessibility.
  • Automatic Passenger Counter (APC)
  • Automated Fare Booth (Smart Cards)
  • Automatic Vehicle Monitor (AVM) – This would gather information about the engine, fuel consumption, etc. It’s like a black box for the bus.

Those are listed roughly in order of priority, though nothing is set in stone. In fact, the AVM might get bumped to the front of the list simply because it offers the best ROI for ETS. The ability to know what’s wrong with a bus on the fly would have a huge impact on the bottom line. Same goes for being able to determine if a bus is getting poor fuel consumption for some reason. Makes sense to me.

There are a few problems with all of this technology, mostly related to cost:

  • Edmonton has bumpy roads and extremely cold temperatures in the winter. On-board equipment needs to be hardened and reliable. We often can’t use the same stuff that San Francisco uses, for example.
  • Rough estimates place the cost per bus at $15,000. There are currently 903 buses in service.
  • By 2012, the number of buses will be closer to 1300, so it won’t get any cheaper to deploy.

Another issue is maintainability. Ideally, each bus would have one computer with a LAN of some kind that everything else just connects to, so that it’s all integrated. Otherwise you end up with many potentially disparate systems.

What I took away from all of this is essentially that ETS is keen to deploy GPS technologies and to make that information available to riders. The challenge is finding a way to make it happen.

Next we shifted gears and talked about the ETS website, Google Transit and my API idea (though I’m definitely not the only one with the idea…dub5 is another interested group). There are improvements to the ETS Trip Planner in the works, so watch for something during the summer. They’re also looking to improve the main ETS website, now that everyone has had time to digest the edmonton.ca redesign.

Unfortunately I can’t talk as much about Google Transit as I’d like to just yet, but I can tell you that a major announcement is coming in the next week or so. I plan to cover it here, and you’ll no doubt see it in the mainstream media. Bottom line: ETS is fully behind Google Transit, and that’s a good thing for Edmontonians.

As for the API idea? They like it and would like to learn more about it. At this point however, getting access to a dump of the same data that Google gets is probably more likely. It would work like this: you sign some sort of agreement with ETS outlining the terms of use (basically something like “I agree not to misrepresent this information…”, and they send you the GTFS data. From there, you could do whatever you like with it. You could build and release your own API, for instance.

Is that going to happen – are they going to make the data available? No guarantees, but they will definitely consider it. Obviously an API would be better for accessing real-time data, but even a recent snapshot would be a step in the right direction. I think this is very encouraging!

If they do go down the data sharing route, I think we should organize an API building weekend!

The final thing I want to mention is that we talked briefly about RSS. My goal is to get every City of Edmonton department publishing as many RSS feeds as possible! It’s horribly underutilized at the moment. I think Bruce and Dennis definitely understand the benefit of RSS, and I hope to see some ETS feeds published soon!

Thanks to both Bruce and Dennis for a great conversation – I learned a lot, and I look forward to keeping the dialogue going.

I want an API for Edmonton Transit (ETS)

By Mack D. Male ·

edmonton transit When the new edmonton.ca website launched back in the fall, I was hopeful that the Edmonton Transit portion of the site would receive more than just a facelift. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Though I’m disappointed, I can understand why. Edmonton Transit is not in the business of developing websites or software, it’s in the business of transportation. They’ve got to make sure buses and trains run efficiently and effectively first, and then they can focus on everything else.

That’s not to say that the website, or BusLink (over the phone), or the other services they offer aren’t important, just that ETS has limited resources and must deploy them accordingly. That’s why I think an Edmonton Transit API makes a lot of sense.

To build an application for looking up transit information, you need both an interface and data (I’m simplifying things a bit). ETS has all of the data of course – they know all of the route numbers, bus stops, and schedule information. What they lack are great interfaces. If ETS exposed their data through an API, third party developers could build great interfaces on top with relative ease.

Here’s the kind of information I’d like to see exposed through an ETS API:

  • Route Information – return name, start and end point, and other details for a given route
  • Stop Information – return coordinates, address, photo, and other information for a given stop
  • Route Stops with Stop Times – return a list of all stops along a given route with stop times
  • Routes at Stop with Times – return a list of routes for a given stop with stop times for each one
  • Search for Stop by Location – return the closest stops for a given address or set of coordinates

That list is similar to the information exposed by the unofficial TransLink API. A good starting point would be to simply clone what they’ve done! More advanced API features could include:

  • Route Interruptions – return a list of routes currently affected by construction or other interruptions
  • Stop Interruptions – return a list of stops currently affected by construction or other interruptions
  • Search for Stop by Landmark – return the closest stops for a given landmark
  • Trip Planner – return a list of route and transfer options for a given location of origin and destination
  • Information for St. Albert Transit and Strathcona County Transit

In the future, the sky is the limit. I know ETS is testing GPS technology on buses, so why not expose “distance from stop” information for a given route? That would be wicked, and incredibly useful when the weather dips below –25 C.

It’s not feasible for ETS to develop interfaces for each new platform that emerges. They have a website, but what about an iPhone application? Or a BlackBerry application? Or a Twitter bot? If they focused their limited software development energies on building an API, I’m confident that local entrepreneurs and software developers would build a plethora of interfaces on top of it. I would definitely build a Twitter bot!

There don’t seem to be many transit systems with APIs available, but that won’t be true for long. Here are a few others I’ve found: TransLink (unofficial), Bay Area Rapid Transit (official), Portland’s TriMet (official), Chicago Transit Authority (unofficial), Charlottetown Transit (unofficial). And here are a couple other resources I’ve come across: the Public Transit Openness Index, and a list of publicly available official GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification) schedule data feeds.

I’d love to see Edmonton Transit take the lead and offer a completely free, fully functional transit API, and I’d be willing to help make it happen. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can now use Google Maps to find ETS trip plans.

Touring the Edmonton Transit D.L. MacDonald LRT Garage

By Mack D. Male ·

Edmonton Transit held an open house today at its D.L. MacDonald facility, known as the LRT garage, as part of Transit Centennial Week celebrations. Sharon and I decided to check it out, and arrived at Clareview just in time for the second last tour. I’ve always been curious to see where the LRT cars are housed and maintained, so I thought the open house and tour was pretty darn cool.

We were led throughout the facility, and got to see where the LRT cars are stored, where their various parts are worked on, where they are painted, etc. The D.L. MacDonald garage is an absolutely massive building, and apparently they are under construction to expand it further. It’s really quite impressive to see.

ETS D.L. MacDonald LRT GarageMack on the new LRV

The highlight of the tour was definitely getting to check out the new SD160 Light Rail Vehicles. ETS will be receiving 37 of them at a rate of two per month, finishing in December 2009. Each car costs approximately $4 million CDN. As the new cars come in from Siemens in Sacramento, the old ones are shipped out for retrofitting. The cost for retrofits is estimated to be another $25 million in total.

At first glance there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the old cars and the new ones, but I’m sure there are extensive differences to the underlying systems (better electronics, for instance). A few of the noticeable changes include: cameras instead of mirrors, digital signs throughout, windows that do not open (which means they must have A/C), more comfortable seats, and slightly different mechanisms on the doors. They also seem a little larger.

The first of the new LRVs will go into service late this year. You can see many more photos of the new cars and the rest of the D.L. MacDonald garage here.

Carsharing with Zipcar

By Mack D. Male ·

zipcar I first learned about Zipcar at the ALT.NET conference a couple weeks ago. I was talking with a developer from Toronto who told me a little about the company. I meant to look it up when I got back to Edmonton but of course, I forgot. Then when I was in Vancouver this past weekend, I noticed a bunch of advertisements for the service. I made a note in my Moleskine to look it up.

I think the concept of carsharing is fantastic:

Carsharing is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. The organization renting the cars may be a commercial business or the users may be organized as a democratically-controlled company, public agency, cooperative, ad hoc grouping. Today there are more than six hundred cities in the world where people can carshare.

Zipcar, founded in 1999, operates in nearly two dozen cities. Currently they are available in just two Canadian cities – Toronto and Vancouver. They claim to be the world’s largest carsharing operation.

In Vancouver, there are two plans. The “pay as you zip” plan costs $55 per year, and you can then rent from $9.75 per hour, gas and insurance included. The other plan is a monthly fee for people who use the service more frequently. The way it works is you become a member, then you can reserve a car online or on the phone.

I am not sure how well Zipcar would work in a city like Edmonton, but it makes total sense in a place like Vancouver. Sharon and I took public transit everywhere we went over the weekend, and it was always really efficient. Sometimes a car is quite handy though, such as when transporting something large or awkward. In those instances, Zipcar could be really useful.

Here’s a comparison with rental cars, and here’s a comparison with owning a car. You can definitely save a lot of money with Zipcar, but I think it would work best in cities with really well-developed public transit systems. That certainly seems to have been their strategy given the cities in which they currently operate.

ETS is constantly improving, so maybe we’ll have Zipcar or something like it here in Edmonton one day.

Edmontonians flock to transit in 2008?

By Mack D. Male ·

100 Years of ETSI never thought I’d write a headline like that, but apparently it’s true. According to an article at CBC last week, Edmonton Transit is reporting that ridership rose by 8% in the first six months of 2008 compared with the same period last year. That’s roughly equivalent to an extra 2.5 million fares. ETS called the increase “astounding”, but seemed confused about the cause:

“Buses are packed, the LRT is packed, ridership continues to increase at an astounding rate,” said Ken Koropeski, director of service development for Edmonton Transit.

The increase is almost three times the growth being experienced by other transit systems across the country, Koropeski said, a trend for the city over the past few years.

The CBC article cites three potential reasons: high gas prices, the booming economy and related influx of newcomers to our city, and the U-Pass. I suspect #2 is the biggest cause, but that’s just my gut reaction. I wonder what impact the growth will have on security calls, which have already increased 20% over the last three years.

I also wonder why ETS didn’t share any of this information back in April? You might recall that Statistics Canada released information at the time that said nearly 80% of Edmontonians get to work in vehicle. Granted the StatsCan information came from the 2006 census, but it would have been a good opportunity for ETS to dispel some myths about stagnant (or least slowly growing) ridership.

I hope the growth continues. ETS turns 100 this year, and will celebrate Centennial Week from September 12th to 20th. You can learn more at the ETS website.

In Edmonton, we like to drive

By Mack D. Male ·

Statistics Canada has released some new data from the last census that shouldn’t shock anyone who lives in Alberta’s capital city. Nearly 80% of us get to work in a vehicle:

The new data from the 2006 census found that 12.7 per cent of workers in the city of Edmonton get to work using public transit, while 79 per cent either drive or travel in a vehicle as a passenger.

Statistics Canada said the reliance on cars seems to increase with the age of the commuter. While those under the age of 25 travelled by vehicle 70.7 per cent of the time, that rate increased to 81.6 per cent for those aged 25 to 34. The rate was even higher for those aged over 35, at 87.2 per cent.

Cheap Gas?

The average Alberta commuter takes a car 84% of the time, so we’re slightly better than the rest of the province.

I guess Bob Boutilier, our city’s Transportation Department GM, wasn’t kidding at the ETS conference a few weeks ago when he said a big challenge is the “pickup truck and two car” mentality of most Albertans. Thanks to the census data, I now have a number to attach to that statement.

Some people like to suggest that we’ll never improve our public transit system until everyone experiences just how bad it is right now. Maybe there’s some truth to that after all. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the majority of that 80% have never been on a bus or LRT car.

That needs to change.