When transit improves in the east end, this Windsorite might use it again

Laura O'Neil says it used to take her two to three hours to get between her east-end home and St. Clair College by taking Transit Windsor buses, so she stopped taking the bus altogether.

"I used to use it religiously, like daily," the former student says.

O'Neil's long commute led her to losing faith in the service, calling it "insanity."  She now walks to and from work.

Now, relief is coming for others who are in the position O'Neil was. Transit Windsor is moving ahead with a new service plan that would see the restructuring of three routes in the Forest Glade and Riverside neighbourhoods.

Tyson Cragg, executive director of Transit Windsor, told CBC News the plans would hopefully be finalized and deployed in January. If not, they would be rolled out in April.

The changes make up "the most significant service change we've done probably in the last two decades, in terms of year over year," he said.

Cragg said the aim is to slash wait times for buses in the east end to be 30 minutes maximum.

Cragg said there will also be changes to the Dominion 5 route, which will be renamed the 115, that will be implemented in January.

Windsor city council approved the plan in April during budget negotiations.

The first step of the service plan's rollout was the introduction of the 418X route in June, which runs from Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare and makes its way through Sandwich Town and the University of Windsor before travelling down Tecumseh Road, ending at Tecumseh Mall.

Transit Windsor's service plan will be accomplished without adding any new buses, meaning service hours and buses will be redeployed from elsewhere in Windsor to the east end.

Of the 34,957 annual service hours that will be lost from other existing routes, 42 per cent of them will come from the 1C route, which already has overcrowded buses.

"There are certain pockets of neighbourhoods that were getting really, really frequent service at the expense of other areas," said Cragg. "The 1C was the area where, from an efficiency perspective, we had a lot of opportunity to move those resources around to make sure that service offerings were a lot more balanced in the east end."

Currently, the 1C route offers a bus every 10 minutes on weekdays.

A transit advocate agreed the changes are significant, but said what's needed are more service hours, especially along the 1C route.

"Some of these roads are already running at the max limit that buses can go on shared access roads; 10-minute frequencies and we're already seeing full buses," said Gabriel Ciavaglia, an organizer with Activate Transit Windsor Essex (ATWE).

The costs for the reorganized service are expected to be around $1.86 million. Even with a one-time injection of $465,769 from the provincial gas tax reserve, the service will create a loss of roughly that same amount.

Cragg said the service will be paid for in half at the fare box, with the rest coming from the provincial gas tax and contribution from municipal taxes.

Ciavaglia said that instead of looking at it as a monetary loss for the city, it should be considered an investment in the city's economy and the community.

"I think that's how other cities view public transportation," he said. "When we're talking about that, we're talking about getting people to work, providing people opportunity, whether that's an educational opportunity, social opportunities, employment opportunities."

Regardless of when the improved service comes, O'Neil said it's about time.

"If it was faster, I would take [transit] way more often."