Mississauga is moving its meandering MiWay buses out of the suburbs and onto a grid that will feed the city’s new transitway and, eventually, the Hurontario LRT.

It means some riders will have to walk farther to the nearest bus stop. But the payoff will be quicker, more reliable trips and longer service hours.

“Straightening” of the routes is part of a five-year plan, developed after research showed residents want shorter bus trips, more frequent service and more buses on the weekends and evenings.

The first phase of the transition begins with about half a dozen route changes on April 11. Ultimately, about 45 of MiWay’s 85 routes will be affected, said transit director Geoff Marinoff.

Mississauga’s bus service has grown with the city’s trademark sprawling suburbs and dead-end residential streets. It’s resulted in routes that typically don’t attract many riders because the frequencies and the lengthy trips make them poor performers.

The MiWay route map “looks like somebody dropped a bunch of spaghetti on the table,” said Marinoff.

But a map of the future grid is more streamlined.

“By straightening it out, we can take those resources and reinvest them into frequency. Because we don’t go on these neighbourhood tours, we can get you to your destination faster,” he said.

Like many of the communities surrounding Toronto, Mississauga was built for the car. But evolving commuting patterns, millennial lifestyles, technology and environmental concerns are forcing a rethink.

Improving bus service isn’t a magic formula for getting more people to take transit.

“We need to make sure there are some disincentives to taking your car. Right now we have free parking all over the place. GO’s been adding these parking structures. It’s so convenient to hop in your car and drive to free parking at a GO lot rather than to walk out and take the bus. You have to manage all these things in concert. Just fixing one of them isn’t going to solve the problem,” said Marinoff.

Office and industrial buildings are also surrounded by giant parking lots.

“Bring the building up to the road face with the parking lot behind it, and all of a sudden somebody can wait in the lobby with the real-time app on their phone and the air conditioning in the summer and the heat in the winter, and they see the bus coming and then they just step out onto the road, because they don’t have to fight through a parking lot,” he said.

Instead of waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a bus in the cold, proximity means they’re outside for just a minute and a half.

There isn’t much you can do about the existing buildings, but as the city develops, it needs to reconsider how it builds new structures that go along with incremental improvements to transit.

Mississauga’s transitway won’t be fully functional for at least another year. But the 4.4 kilometres and four stations that opened last year — along with two more this year — are already shaving four or five minutes off bus trips.

That’s 10 minutes a day, or 45 to 50 minutes a week — time savings which will grow as more stations come online.

“It may not be completely competitive with the car in terms of travel time. But it can get close. That’s the sweet spot you have to hit — that reliability, consistency and competitive travel time. You don’t have to beat the car. You just have to get within spitting distance,” said Marinoff.

The economic advantage, particularly to millennials (who aren’t as enamoured of driving and car ownership as their elders) are obvious. A transit pass costs $1,400 a year. Owning and running a car could cost 10 times as much.

In Mississauga, many families have two or three cars, which mostly sit in the driveway all weekend. That’s why Marinoff believes Uber and autonomous cars will be successful. For many people, partial ownership will be enough.

The public resources for road use and parking could be redeployed to other community services. On a personal level, “that’s like your RRSP, or your house paid off sooner or some really nice vacations,” he said.

“If we can get this mix right in terms of how people move and make public transit more attractive, it frees up resources that are available to many other things that maybe have a lower impact on the environment and maybe impact our quality of life.”

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OAKVILLE ON THE GRID

Oakville Transit began moving to a grid system in 2009. With all the service previously oriented to the Oakville and Clarkson GO stations, it was virtually impossible to get across town.

But once routes were operating east-west on major arteries, riders could get across town without going to the GO first.

The effect on ridership was immediate.

“It was pretty amazing. You should see the graph,” said transit director Barry Cole.

“In that 36-month period before we made the change, ridership had only gone up about 1.8 per cent over the three-year period. And then we changed in September ’09 to the grid system, and ridership increased over the next 36-month period by just over 20 per cent. That 36 months included 32 consecutive months of increase,” he said.

The gains extended to all demographic groups, as opposed to working commuters, which would have been the result if only GO connections were improved.

“Transit ridership is about convenience, reduced travel time, more frequent service. A bus almost needs to be the car in the garage for the person using it, so once we went to the grid system, it meant people could move across the town, north, south, east, west, uninterrupted,” said Cole.

Now Oakville has a new five-year plan designed to goose ridership again by refining the grid and adding connections to key destinations such as the new hospital.

It is reallocating service from poorer performing routes to provide higher frequency buses along major thoroughfares.

Frequencies on key routes will increase from a bus every 20, 30 or 40 minutes to 15-minute service in the rush hours and 30 minutes in the off-peak.

The plan should also drive the bus system’s cost recovery up from 30 per cent at the fare box to 36 per cent.

Like Mississauga, Oakville is setting its sights on raising the percentage of total trips taken on transit, from about 5 per cent now to about 20 per cent in the next 20 years.

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