The new city council inherits the slowest growing transit system in the province which has recorded drops in ridership in four of the last seven years. Councillors are arriving with lots of election promises to improve the HSR but also saddled with a quarter-century tradition of refusing to increase transit funding.
Yearly provincial surveys put Hamilton far behind other large municipalities in ridership growth with only a 3.1 percent gain in the last eight years. In the same 2006-2013 period, Brampton recorded over 90 percent growth, Durham and Waterloo regions over 50 percent, and even St Catharines climbed nearly 11 percent despite the latter city losing population.
Mississauga is up 25 percent since 2006 and earlier this month opened the first segment of a $460 million bus rapid transit (BRT) system that will cover 18 km by its completion in 2017. Both the federal and provincial governments provided some financing, but nearly 70 percent is being covered by Mississauga residents who are already obtaining faster annual transit growth than Hamilton has achieved over the last seven.
There’s a similar picture of high velocity transit growth in Waterloo Region where last year the Grand River Transit system passed Hamilton despite being nearly seven and a half million passengers behind the HSR in 2006. Overall GRT ridership has doubled since 1999 and it exceeded 22 million in 2013 while the HSR managed only 21.8 million – even fewer passenger trips than it transported in 2011.
Waterloo has also gone through the LRT-BRT debate, but settled it earlier this year and confirmed the build decision in last month’s municipal election. In a contest focused on the LRT, regional chair Ken Seiling won nearly 2.5 times as many votes as an anti-LRT businessman. New mayors were elected in open races in both Kitchener and Waterloo with both in favour of LRT, while in Cambridge the anti-LRT mayor was re-elected but two regional councillors holding the same position were defeated.
The story was the same in Ottawa where Mayor Jim Watson won over three-quarters of the votes cast after seeking a “very strong mandate” to move ahead with an additional LRT line. Ottawa Transpo carried nearly 98 million riders last year, a decline of 8 million after a $20 million budget cut in 2011 but still six million more than 2006.
In Canadian cities under two million population, a September release by the Canadian Urban Transit Association says transit use is growing by seven percent a year. "While ridership continues its upward trend on average across the entire country, there was a marked increase in smaller cities across Canada" said CUTA President and CEO Michael Roschlau.
The dismal picture in Hamilton doesn’t appear to be mysterious. The comprehensive “Rapid Ready” transit report handed to councillors nearly two years ago was blunt about the need for much more HSR service.
“Hamilton has added some 55,000 transit service hours to the regular transit system between 2003 and 2010, but this has more or less been in line with population growth and necessary service area expansion,” said the report. “To achieve gains in ridership per capita and transit mode shares, the level of investment in transit, both in the amount and quality of service, needs to greatly outpace the rate of population growth.”
Those 55,000 additional hours (bringing the current total to 685,000) were almost entirely paid for by a $10.5 million annual transit grant from Queens Park. At the time of the report there had been practically no new city monies provided to the HSR since the mid-1990s, aside from money-losing routes to a new Walmart and an under-utilized business park.
The Rapid Ready report called for an extra $44.8 million a year to HSR by 2017 just to get ready for LRT. That echoed the city’s Transportation Master Plan which argued $12 million a year needed to be added to the HSR budget starting in 2008. Neither recommendation has been implemented.
Last spring, after repeated postponements and a last-minute reduction, council approved minor cross-mountain HSR route improvements at a gross annual cost of less than half a million dollars instead of the $2.6 million in changes presented by staff.
Transit growth in large Ontario Municipalities
| 2006 | 2013 | Growth | % Rise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hamilton | 21,165,302 | 21,817,842 | 652,540 | 3.1 |
| St Kitts | 4,752,760 | 5,272,778 | 520,018 | 10.9 |
| Mississauga | 29,022,030 | 35,789,013 | 6,766,983 | 23.3 |
| York Region | 17,108,258 | 22,709,611 | 5,970,030 | 32.7 |
| Ottawa | 91,839,2769 | 97,809,306 | 5,601,353 | 6.5 |
| Durham | 6,942,129 | 10,625,546 | 3,683,417 | 53.1 |
| Brampton | 10,139,107 | 19,405,803 | 9,266,696 | 91.4 |
| London | 18,710,000 | 23,570,746 | 4,860,746 | 26.0 |
| Waterloo | 13,726,874 | 22,000,000 | 8,273,126 | 60.3 |