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My city has announced a bike lane upgrade for my city. There was of course the "no one uses it" argument. However a pop up information, and feedback gathering booth held by the city was along the bike route in question. While I was there giving my feedback on what should be considered for building the project. Multiple people on bikes and scooters were going by even though it is currently only a painted gutter. The city planners commented that it was nice to see that it's being used and definitely needs the upgrade.

If small town can’t have small then why is there a Planned High Speed Rail In California Which i support that project and before you ask, no it’s not failed, it’s good actually, because they should at least connect to their local transit in small cities are Palmdale, Madera, Fresno, Merced, Stockton, Modesto And Gilroy, it could bring Buses and Light Rail to their small town too where the high speed rail station is located, Subway is good but it’s too expensive to build it, So not only the public transit is good to small cities in California but also in America and International countries.

great point about minimum wage workers ad induced poverty due to lack of transit

Pretty accurate meme.

No people started buying cars because they became more affordable making public transit obsolete. 🤡🌐

On demand service is almost always a terrible idea! 😤

Yea. I heard bus drivers needing to pee in bottles bc of not enough break time. I would never want to do that. I also as a passenger need at least 3 minutes of time to transfer between busses and other busses (or smth else like streetcars, LRTs and trains) at some large terminals or connections between different modes of transit

Some pretty interesting solutions but I was definitely caught off guard when you said cities below 1 million people. Like, there's only one city in my whole country of Denmark which has over 1 million people, and a small city here is typically considered one with around 50.000 people or less. Of which i am from one, Hillerød, with 36.000 residents and close proximity to the capital city Copenhagen. We do actually have one of the best bus systems in Denmark for a town our size with 2 urban routes running every 20 minutes during the day and once per hour on evenings and sundays. Alongside several once per hour bus routes to other smaller towns in the municipality. Plus 4 different regional bus routes that run between every 15 minutes and once per hour depending on the route and 5 different passenger rail lines. All the buses generally run until 10pm and until 11pm on friday and saturday nights. Though we're far better off than a lot of the country which have no evening bus service at all and their towns bus routes shut down completely by 6pm. Though it aint perfect. Tickets here and in Denmark as a whole are generally integrated nationwide and cross compatible across buses and trains, even our state railways. But this also leads to a crazy conveluted ticketting system with tonnes of zones that many struggle to navigate. And this is on top of having super high prices, about twice the prices for transit as in Vancouver Canada for a comparable example. We also struggle a ton with having nice and inviting bus terminals and train stations here as our officials are high on micromanaging economics for efficiency gains. The bus station here in Hillerød is one of the few nationwide which has a roof at all, but its also from 1980, run down, heavily vandalised, the bolts holding benches onto wooden wall collumns are in such bad shape the benches lean forward just by sitting on them, and moss grows through the roofs and makes rainwater leak through. We do also have a text service for departure times but nobody uses it. It runs with a user charge of 5 DKK or 1 Canadian dollar per time its used. By comparison, Data plans are dirt cheap here, like 50gb a month and unlimited calls and text for something like 20 CAD a month. Not to mention we have a whole thing with phone dependency. The bus stops here dont even have schedules anymore as officials thought they were a needless waste cause "According to our studies, majority of passengers plan their journey in advance with the journey planner website or app anyway". We technically also have a nationwide Dial-a-ride service but it is really bad. It uses an entirely separate and very expensive fare system from the rest of transit, it needs to be booked at least 2 hours in advance, it is very unreliable (All times Ive used it, I've had to wait between 20 and 40 minutes after the scheduled pickup time, causing me to miss the connections I were booked to reach), and the vehicles arent particularly accessible. It really is just a bad taxi. Thankfully one of the transit agencies in Denmark are trialling a more modern version of demand responsive transit in a small town called Haslev. Theirs uses an app and call center to book journeys, which are fixed to going between bus stops, but which uses actual minibuses with accessibility, and can be booked on a very short notice. I've tried it and all my trips had just between 8 and 22 minutes between I booked the bus and the bus came. I will say though that while I wish our transit here could improve, and I know it can, it won't happen. Our government has one of the tigthest economic laws in the EU which puts a stranglehold on municipal and regional budgets. And our Liberatarian minister for transport has commissioned an "expert committee" that he himself put together to look at reforming and improving public transit. Sounds good, but the catch is that it must not cost any more to operate than the current transit nationwide (which is already cash strapped). So all the reports so far are suggesting are to basically replace rural small town bus lines with carpooling and ubers and *maybe* those improved dial a rides that can be booked spontaniously for "High demand periods".... not looking very bright.

My city has about 1 million people in it but it’s dense enough that I can walk pretty much anywhere. We have two tram lines but they’re mostly useless. The thing that makes it work though is that we have great heavy rail connection. I think that’s how it is especially for small towns. If you can get out without a car and the city isn’t designed by idiots it doesn’t even need much transit.

The fact that Arlington, Texas has more people than Saskatoon, Regina, Red Deer and more has zero public transit since 2017 because of their state gas tax law.

Yup. I’ve seen drivers try to rush eat and I have a theory it’s behind all these drivers falling asleep behind the wheel.

saskatoon mentioned :DDDD

Re waiting: having relied on many rural and semi-rural bus systems in the US and UK, I can definitively state that it's better for a bus to be 10 minutes late than leave 1 minute early.

Odd so bus centric, but I guess that is a North American thing. My local city (Toulouse population is about 500,000 with about 1 million in the metro area depending what you count) probably fits your definition of a smaller city. It currently has 2 metro lines and is digging a 3rd, has a long tram line, brt services and an urban gondola along with extensive local buses and even a little heavy rail too. Look at what is possible for smaller cities outside of North America and you will be surprised!

Trolleybusses are better than battery-electric busses

In my country, Greece, outside of Athens, many teenagers are sadly killed in motorcycle accidents. In Athens, due to the presence of public transport, teenagers needn't rely on motorcycles.

I like how you call out Winnipeg then immediately show the exact same lines I use 😭

Luckily I live in Europe. My city has only 140,000 inhabitants, but there are four tram lines that run every 6 minutes, further there are also three-section articulated buses. The network is completed by 10 regional train stations within the city limits plus one main station with long distance services.

Real

My hometown in turkey is a city called Çankırı, it has around 100k residents in paper but in reality have around 55 to 75k people living constantly, it never had a proper public transportation historicly however after city mayor changed in 2019 everything changed in a perfect way, what they done was buying some brand new small buses along with few second hand standard 40ft buses and run them between most important places in the city. one line runs from coach terminal to city hospital and another one running from corporate houses to coach terminal, those were good drawed lines but what makes them perfect was the schedule, they decided to run those line every 15 minutes from the start. That was seem as quiet bold at first but in the end it work perfectly and people started the use public transport little by little and within 1 and half year i started to see crowded buses which i never seen before. City management tried to re introduce intercity rail service to capital ankara aswell, they succesfully introduce a tourist train which runs once in a week but its not a proper rail connection. It seems like city mayor also tried to make a streetcar line but couldnt get any budget from it but fact that he tried for it is enought to make me happy. I apreciate this kind of things but unfortunately getting finances for this kind of things can be hard for small cities, soo central or federal government should take responsibility for well being of small communities aswell as large ones. Hope to see a government like that.

I find it interesting how all of your shots for Strathcona County Transit were within Edmonton city limits.

Public transit doesn't cover its own costs which requires public subsidies (taxpayer support). The travel patterns have changed as noticed but still add time and inconvenience to almost all trips. Overall, a decent video.

We have the cargo train tracks parallel to yellow head why not put a lrt on that track

4:29 My man. Thank you. That is LITERALLY what I keep telling *everyone* that this city is seriously needing. Well, I don't even advocate for 3, I'd settle with 2 lines. Also, ironically that image on screen showing the purple and orange lines, that highlights EXACTLY where one of my "dream" lines runs lol. Another Fun Fact, "fake" London is already larger in metropolitan population than Calgary was when they started their LRT lines. This city is seriously overdue.

My hometown (30,000 people) used to have a street car and a central business/housing downtown. Now most of the business is on the outskirts of town, often with no sidewalks. It has a bus service, but that service stops at 6PM and doesn't run on Sundays at all. I worked at a mall for years, which meant getting out of work at 10PM and walking along a multi-lane highway with no lights for a couple miles, even in a foot of snow. I also went to night school at a local college, which was also on the outskirts of town and also meant walking along an unlit highway when I got out of class at 8 or 10PM. The lack of transit wasn't THE reason I left. But it was A reason for leaving. Since I left, they've actually cut service for the bus even more.

When I was living in Hungary. I lived in a city with less than 30k people. It had a train line to the largest city nearby hourly. Buses to all the local villages/cites nearby every 10 mins during peak and long distance buses to the capital every two hours. The buses to the other cities were also used at local city buses with several stops within the city making it easy to get anywhere.

What a great and well researched video! It is interesting how a lot of these fixes are not just ways to improve transit in small cities, but to improve accessibility in general, regardless of how small your city is. For example, think of just how terrible the mono centric nature of the Chicago L has been for that city. Also people who don’t have data don’t exclusively live in small cities they can live in big towns too, so that would definitely help them a lot as well!

Hello! I really enjoyed your video. You make really good points, and I'd like to expand on what you said that might apply better to some cities. You mentioned that small cities should switch from hub-and-spoke to direct suburb to suburb. In smaller cities and towns, the reason why hub-and-spoke models exist is not to serve downtown commuters. In a polycentric small city, there isn't a large job concentration downtown anyways. The reason why this model is used is to provide a central transfer point that can provide amenities to riders (washrooms, shelters for people waiting to transfer, ticketing and customer service). It also allows for you to design a network centred around a takt (clockface timed transfers). Takts are basically the only way to do transfers in a network that only runs 30-60 min freq. or worse, as a rider will be unwilling or unable to wait 30 minutes or longer at a random suburban intersection waiting to make a transfer to an hourly bus in a grid network. Minimising transfers is good, but direct destination to destination routes are very hard to serve with a one seat ride in a small polycentric city because you usually end up with a high number of route deviations, which makes a route indirect, which makes it slow. On your point of on-demand transit: There certainly is a use case for on-demand transit, but know that if you switch to it from a fix route service, only the most desperate will continue to use it (captive riders), and for those who continue to use it it's almost always a downgrade. On-demand transit often needs to be booked in advance, isn't particularly flexible to a rider's schedule, often it will have erratic pickup times and travel times because it may need to serve other riders along the way. It might not even be able to provide a ride at all if a vehicle isn't available at that time. It's exorbitantly expensive to run and impossible to scale. You'll basically be operating a really shitty taxpayer funded uber. Ironically, the success of on demand transit depends on as little people as possible using it, otherwise ops cost skyrocket past fixed route service. Again, this is a tradeoff that might be worthwhile to make. There's a balance to be struck between coverage and service. On your point about adjusting service standards: I'd say this is a really bad idea because it lowers accountability from the transit agency. A route can be really unreliable but the agency can still claim it is on time by shifting the goal post. If you want to make life easier for drivers, then pad schedules. Schedule padding trades travel time for travel time consistency. Finally, I'd like to say that the small city context between Canada and the US is very different (which I understand you're primarily addressing the Canadian context here). Built form and small city typology vary drastically across the border. Vancouver (our big city) would be a very small city in the US (San Antonio sized). Could you imagine a San Antonio sized city having the most successful metro system by ridership of any American city sans NYC? Ottawa (a city with an entire light metro system!) is a little bit bigger than Louisville KY. Kitchener-Waterloo and Winnipeg have no comparison to a US city for how small they are yet how much transit success they've achieved. Sorry for the long comment! I hope it's good food for thought. Keep up the great work!

I am from a medium-sized city in Chile called Copiapo and there is a project to turn it into the first city in America with its entire bus fleet 100% electric. The buses have already been purchased and they are waiting for them to arrive in the city. I find it curious that a city as small as mine would be the one to undertake a project of this caliber.

I live in Toronto and even I see how useful good public transit is for smaller cities. I like to draw fantasy transit maps as a hobby and have drafted a few for the Waterloo region, London Ont, Hamilton, Halifax and Saskatoon, to name a few.

Winnipeg is just about broke, so a lot of the road renewals are including bike lanes. I just went to a public consultation for some new bike lanes in my neighbourhood today, and there is some hope.

Alas London only has *two* LRT lines (Tramlink and DLR). I think there are 11 Underground lines and six Overground lines. London, Ontario, however has a very limited bus to the airport.

TBF I was surprised at you setting the threshold for "small" at 1 million, rather than 100K.

Town of Bridgewater, NS has just shy of 9k people. They made their transit pilot project permanent in 2019. Granted it's one bus, doing a one hour loop, six days a week. But if thats what it takes to get the ball rolling.

If you ask me, no city is TOO SMALL FOR TRANSIT, especially RAPID TRANSIT. Heck even Edmonton had 93 KM of streetcars when its population was less than 50,000. And even when it got modern RAPID TRANSIT-STYLE LRT, it had less then 500,000 and keep in mind that also included running a small subway section beneath downtown. In that respect I am glad that even Red Deer which ONLY has an urban population of 100,000 has plans for LRT in the future with even the map and station locations being pre-selected if you find the right document. I'm now looking to you Lethbridge! You also have 100,000 a huge university and campus across the river valley from downtown, an equally impressive community college and a busy airport that I can only see getting busier in the future... Make it so!

I grew up in the suburbs of Halifax, NS, and the transit was frankly terrible. Taking transit took 2-3 times as long a driving, non peak service was hourly and ended too early at night. Things have improved slightly since the 80's and 90's. They are finally bringing in an electronic fair option and there are a handful of bus lanes on a few busy streets. However, the line near my mother's apartment building is rush hour only! She is considering giving up her car, but she can only take a bus in rush hour? Ridiculous.

There is a city of 300k in western Norway called Bergen that has it's own (and constantly expanding!!) light rail system, called the Bybanen, super cool imo. From what I understand, they currently fund it through road tolls (and state funding ofc). Super cool thing, might wanna check it out :)

These days if you live in a small city, your proximity to all your needs is further than if you live in a big city. Because some of those needs are in another city.

The North American way of classifying big and small cities as well as the mentality of "my city is too small for transit" while having five-digit populations is just so insane to me. If your city has hundreds of thousands of people in it, it is far from small, and it shouldn't just have transit, it should need transit, good transit! A city that size should not exist in a way where it is so car-centric and sprawly that transit is an inherently inferior and ineffective option. Unfortunately, way too many do, and it shows in their dead downtowns and deserted sidewalks. At the end of the day, it's more about density and available things to do and places to be, than size alone. For context, I live in a city at the southern end of the Rhineland conurbation in western Germany, with a population in the immediate surrounding metro area of about 500k. We have both light rail and tram lines and extensive urban and regional bus networks, as well as good access to regional and long-distance rail with many departures every hour from multiple stations on multiple railway lines. And it really couldn't work any other way. The light rail runs every 5 minutes in its core section and trains get packed during rush hours, especially when schools finish too. Light rail and buses to surrounding towns (yes, we have interurban light rail) run up to every 10 minutes, carrying thousands of commuters every day while taking up a miniscule amount of space compares to the equivalent in cars and while being less polluting. There are some definite flaws in our system, like cancellations, infrequent orbital connections or bus delays, but the bones are good, and every city with a bit of density of at least 300k needs those bones. It needs light rail or good trams, it needs regional connections of good frequency and scope, it needs a viable alternative to driving, because there is nothing freeing about being forced to drive. I don't have a driver's license, and I never want to give up the ability to have options, options for taking good transit.

I mean it's viable for going somewhere within a small town. The issue is connecting these town to cities. Their not going to make a 40mile long bus line connection to a city. Nor will they run a train line through a mountainous area. Town and City municipalities don't get along in the first place. The Government won't pay for the bus infrastructure. An entrepreneur won't take the risk. Unless there's a considerably amount of change I doubt it would happen.

My company is actually working on providing transit in a rural small-town locale in Ontario. Your video is pretty good. The main issue though is political will. Even when the residents of an area want transit, the majority of the voters in rural areas are always CAR OWNERS 😮‍💨 So it is incredibly challenging to convince a cash-strapped rural area that a bus that serves 40 to 70 people a day is good value when most of the voters are complaining about potholes, dirt-roads and well-water. There is only so much money to go around. And regarding on-demand transit (especially in rural-areas), it's a failed concept, it's not a good operating model. Taxis are not public transit. You can't run variable cost operations with a fixed cost model. Fixed costs and scheduled operations are more palatable to everyone involved than a bus/van whose costs may vary by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and shows up kind of whenever it does. If you are working with a polycentric rural community, you have to link the population centres to service centres first with a linear fixed route. This gives the most people a chance to experiment with transit. Once the fixed-route operation is sustainable, THEN you might branch out to demand-oriented operations that use your fixed route as hub. But of course... as you mentioned, labour is the biggest cost after fuel. Insurance is actually by and far the biggest challenge as it is a dead-weight cost that doesn't generate income, ridership or operating metrics. Fix everything I noted above, and then more small towns would do this. Great video! 😀

A feel like a lot of small cities would be wanting self-driving buses when there’s a shortage of people to drive the buses. Especially if you’re trying to improve transit in a declining city.

I wouldn't consider cities like Winnipeg or Quebec City as small cities; they SHOULD have big city transit and are not that far behind the larger cities (and are larger than Edmonton or Calgary when they got their LRT systems by a decent bit) - I would consider a smaller cities like under 200k or 100k - stuff like Red Deer or Lethbridge on the larger end; and stuff like Cold Lake or Brooks on the smaller end

My town inaugurated a bus service a few months ago, and it has fairly good reach, including an out of town stop that connects to another bus service. However, its frequency is atrocious, and I'm certain that it's the main reason why it has low patronage from the townspeople. That and the limited time, operating only on weekdays from 6:30am to 6:30pm. I think that if it had more frequency, people would use it more, and instill confidence in the bus service.

This is why all the Portland suburbs outside of Portland should adopt a commuter train with double deck and add the weekends.

Completely disagree, busses drastically slow down transit, it would create a huge problem and many inconveniences for smaller cities and towns. They make sense in large cities where there is already large amounts of traffic, but not in small ones

I live in northern Sweden and for a city of 28 000 we have 4 bus lines. 2 of them run every 20 minutes during peak hours and every 60 minutes during the off-peak, all days of the week except sundays. 1 line runs every 30 minutes during peak hours and every 60 minutes during the off-peak. 1 line runs during peak hours only, every 60 minutes, with no service at all on weekends. The other lines have service on saturdays but not sundays. No matter where you live there will not be a long walk to get to transit. Theres a problem tho. When the buses are busy, the bus lines are very unreliable and if you have a connection to another bus, youre most certainly gonna miss it. There are some smaller towns and the transit solution they have built in there that the regional buses can be used as local buses while traveling through towns but then make less stops and are faster when on the countryside. In the capital city, Stockholm, where they have metro and light rail and commuter rail and stuff, buses are mostly designed to shuttle passengers to a rail transit station, except for some routes in the downtown which are used for routes that arent already traversed by subway lines and some longer-distance routes in the suburbs that are used as shortcuts to not have to go that far to transfer to another line.

Text message based real time bus information is almost certainly a lot cheaper now, especially if a transit agency is already doing it for transit apps / Google Maps / etc. I'm quite sure that cost has a lot to do with setting up the system to track and respond based on basically zero preexisting infrastructure, but it's not 2006 anymore, and there are services like Twilio that make doing SMS services extremely easy

Unfortunately, in the US public transit is looked down on and associated with riders that middle class people wouldn't want to be around! I doubt that this will ever change, making transit something that is not well funded.

Canmore Alberta has a population of 16,000 and public transit. It also runs a regional transit bus over to Banff Alberta, which has a population of only 8300., The latter is in a national park so there was some funding to reduce car traffic there.