A new study released by Statistics Canada says commuters are not using public transit very much to get to work, but officials in St. Albert say it’s not much of a cause for concern.
The study, released Wednesday, says that roughly 82 per cent of Canadians who commute to work did so by car in 2010, while another 12 per cent used public transit and six per cent walked or biked. Of the 10.6 million who travelled by car, about nine million have never tried using public transit to get to work and about 7.4 million thought it would be inconvenient, Statistics Canada found.
About 1.6 million of the car commuters said that they had tried using transit to get to work, but 53 per cent of them had found it inconvenient.
But St. Albert Transit director Bob McDonald said the numbers weren’t too troubling for him, since the report dealt only with workers going to and from work, and didn’t deal with post-secondary students going to and from school.
“For our operation, [post-secondary] is a pretty large portion of our market,” he said. “Nationally, public transit keeps rising — the number of people, the number of trips taken every year keeps going up.
“I don’t know that I’m entirely surprised about the work trips, but the forces that are acting on whether or not people take transit versus driving their own car, it’s not entirely about travel time,” he added. “There’s issues of cost and parking availability, and that’s certainly driving a fair amount of what’s going on with post-secondary students.”
Meanwhile, St. Albert city councillor Wes Brodhead — who by day serves as director of bus operations for Edmonton Transit Service — said he’s not surprised by the numbers at all.
“When you’re serving yourself, it’s always more convenient. When you’re alone in the car and you only have to worry about yourself, it’s always quicker,” he said. “Public transit serves the greater good, and we have all sorts of people riding on the bus. We’re serving public transit and we’re carrying large numbers of people, and in order to do that effectively, you have to generate loads and destinations that serve the most people. And that might not always work the best for everybody.”
Despite what the study says, Brodhead believes public transit adds a lot of value to a community like St. Albert.
“Many in the community wouldn’t have transportation options if transit wasn’t there, so from that perspective, I’m tickled that St. Albert actually has public transit,” he said.
As much as post-secondary students make up a large portion of StAT’s ridership, McDonald said he’d like to see more commuters use transit to get to and from work in Edmonton, and several improvements are on the way or have recently been implemented to encourage that.
“We’re trying to make things easier for them to do that — NextBus is an example,” he said, referring to StAT’s new real-time bus schedule information system that potential passengers can access through cellphones.
“A portion of every public transit journey is a wait time, at least initially, to get into the system. Walking to the bus is one thing, and waiting is another. If people are confident that they know exactly when the bus is going to be coming, there’ll be less waiting time involved. We’re making an effort with NextBus to try and reduce that time,” McDonald said.
Another big step in that battle, both Brodhead and McDonald said, will be the park-and-ride station slated for the south end of St. Albert along Anthony Henday Drive, which is scheduled to be operational by 2014.
“That’s one of the things that will make public transit more appealing — at least in my mind — to the citizens of St. Albert,” Brodhead said. “What I’m finding is that people who commute don’t want to drive into the city, drive into the University [of Alberta], drive to Grant MacEwan, to the hospital or wherever, but they wouldn’t mind taking the bus from a park-and-ride site provided that, when they got off the bus, they could get into the car and have the freedom to go wherever they wish. Then, on the way home, you can stop for a loaf of bread or a quart of milk.”
“We’re cognizant of the travel time issue, and we’re trying to work with our partners here to improve our performance in that respect,” McDonald added.
