Opinion: Growing Saskatoon needs a new approach to public transit

By Guest Columnist of Saskatoon Starphoenix

BRT, or bus rapid transit, is coming. Funding is now in place to implement the $250-million BRT plan, which was adopted several years ago.

What is bus rapid transit and why do we need it? Think of BRT as a subway line or light-rail transit line, only using buses.

Back in 2012, a new growth plan for Saskatoon was started on the premise that Saskatoon cannot continue to grow in the same way into the future or it won’t become a city we are happy with.

The consultants who helped work on that plan (Urban Systems) determined that Saskatoon was large enough to support a BRT system. In 2016, city council adopted the new growth plan to 500,000 which included a new BRT system as the centrepiece.

What kind of transit system do we have now? Saskatoon is served by what is commonly referred to as a ‘coverage’ system. This means that buses cover as much of the city as possible, stopping at infrequent intervals. Coverage systems work better in small cities.

The larger the city gets, the less suitable it is and struggles to provide a meaningful or useful public service. A coverage system simply does not work well in a large city. This is why it takes 40 minutes to get from Stonebridge or Silverspring to the downtown.

Not many people will take a bus each day to work using a service like that. Anyone who thinks BRT is too expensive should know that our current coverage system requires over $30 million in local tax support to operate and serves only four to five per cent of commuters.

That is a lot of money for a system which serves a small market and will only operate less efficiently over time. Why is BRT better? BRT works better in larger cities. Unlike the coverage system, BRT is known as a ‘frequency’ system.

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Key routes on major arterials will serve to provide a direct, frequent service which will run back and forth along fixed routes all day long. The buses will stop frequently, every seven to 10 minutes and pick people up at comfortable transit stations.

Saskatoon is planning to implement three BRT lines: red, blue and green. The red line will travel east-west, the blue line will travel north-south, and the green line will serve the northeast. The city will still run ‘feeder’ routes in the city which will serve to bring customers to the BRT lines.

The feeder routes will loop through neighbourhoods to pick customers up who live beyond a reasonable walking distance to a BRT line.

How do we shape Saskatoon to be more transit-oriented? First, our land-use patterns, which have not changed much in 70 years, must change. Zoning has started to change which will permit more residential and employment density near rapid transit corridors and transit stations.

Second, the BRT must serve major destinations to be successful.

Right now, the BRT lines are set up to directly serve the University of Saskatchewan (where staff, faculty and students equals the population of Moose Jaw), the university endowment lands (1,000 acres of development lands inside Circle Drive), the new central library, the three major hospitals, downtown, the new downtown entertainment district and TCU Place, the new Saskatchewan Polytechnic campus and Innovation Place.

As density starts to spring up along the BRT routes, the system should see higher patronage.

With a BRT system, Saskatoon is set to enter the realm of big cities. But it will require us to ‘make room’ for buses, which need to be separated from traffic congestion to provide a ‘rapid’ service and have any value.

One thing is for certain, there will be an awkward transition period over many years, which will test the patience of drivers in our auto-dependent culture. We will most certainly require a city council that has an eye to the future and the city’s long-term best interest at heart.

Alan Wallace is the planning director at Wallace Insights and former director of planning and development with the City of Saskatoon.

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