A long-term campaign to entice people out of their cars and into other ways of moving around Peterborough has worked for walking and cycling.

Transit ridership has been the stubborn exception.

That's the background to the latest remake of the city bus system. A $500,000 public consultation and study aimed at mapping out the next 30 years is expected to get underway after city council gives the green light on Monday.

Most of the work and change should take place over the next few years.

One major intention is to remake the bus route design. The current radial system has almost all buses running on out-and-back routes that start and end at the downtown Simcoe St. terminal.

Getting from point A to point B requires a trip downtown and a transfer and can take 80 minutes.

Expect the consultants to recommend more cross-city routes that skip the trip downtown.

A really radical move could scrap the radial design in favour of a complete grid system.

Major goal No. 2 is to create a new downtown terminal where buses can drive in one side and out the other. No time-consuming, traffic-snarling need to back up onto Simcoe St. as happens now.

The consultants will also look at whether the Simcoe St. terminal should be rebuilt or a new location found.

If VIA Rail develops a Toronto-to-Ottawa train line through Peterborough and needs a downtown station, a joint Via, city transit, GO bus and Greyhound terminal would be the ideal way to go. That would require a lot of agreement between partners but is so logical that each should be not just willing but eager.

On the other hand, shifting to a grid system could mean the city doesn't need a central terminal.

Those are issues to be worked out. If the study stays on track a proposed new route system will be ready a year from now.

If the city decides on a new downtown terminal and wants to wait for train service to develop it that timeline could be longer. Via Rail still needs federal government approval for its ambitious $6-billion plan.

Once all those decisions are made the watch will begin to see how effective changes will be.

A staff report to council earlier this year outlined the results of the city's last transportation plan, a five-year review done in 2012.

Again, the focus was to get more people riding buses and bicycles and walking, fewer using a car.

The city has invested in a sidewalk construction program and expanded both the trail network and cycling lanes on streets.

It worked. Between 2011 and 2016 cycling trips nearly tripled and walking trips increased by 50 per cent. Together they have already passed a target of eight per cent of all trips.

Bus trips struggle by comparison, increasing just 16 per cent over the same period and falling well short of a 2021 target of six per cent.

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A recent decision to spend $2 million on a "smart" system that allows schedulers to track and re-route buses in real time and passengers to follow their bus on a smart phone app might help.

So might the new "community" system that uses smaller buses between designated high-interest locations.

New routes and a new terminal would be bigger fixes. Ridership numbers will show if they improve the service.