It’s taken two years but residents in Hamilton’s densest neighbourhood have succeeded in their battle for improved bus service. Only large private companies have been granted new or modified HSR routes in the last decade. This is the first time that a resident petition has won better transit.
The successful neighbourhood lies immediately east of Centennial Parkway between Queenston and Barton and is one of the city’s poorest. More than a third of its residents, including over half the children under six, live below the poverty line.
Riverdale West is a go-to neighbourhood for new immigrants. More than four in ten residents are visible minorities and nearly half were born outside Canada. One fifth do not yet have citizenship.
A little less than a third of Hamilton households are rented, but in Riverdale the rate is 84 percent. That includes four large apartment buildings on Grandville Avenue between Delawana and Violet that the HSR enhancement will serve.
The existing route 56 will be slightly modified to take the bus along those three streets and back out onto Centennial Parkway – an addition of about 650 metres to the length of the route. For the Grandville apartment dwellers it will mean no longer having to walk over a kilometre along a high-speed arterial road or through a massive parking lot to get to the Eastgate Square transit terminal on Queenston Road.
The 56 bus used to offer just summer service between Eastgate Mall and Confederation Park but it was made year round at the demand of Wal-Mart when the chain re-located to the Smart Centres big box commercial centre adjacent to the QEW in 2012.
HSR has also expanded its service in the last decade as part of the deal the city made to attract the Maple Leaf bread and wiener facilities to the Red Hill business park and service to the airport was also restored. But city council has squeezed the HSR budget so the transit agency has focused its limited resources on trying to meet official service standards on long-established routes rather than expanding its coverage.
There are over 6500 people in Riverdale West. There are existing HSR lines on both the southern and northern boundaries but nothing that goes through the neighbourhood until this September when the modified route for the 56 bus takes effect.
That’s a response to a petition of over 550 names that grew out of work by the Community Action Program for Canada (CAPC) which is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada and focuses on health and well-being of children under six and is managed locally by the Social Planning and Research Council. It helped bring together a 15-member community council that identified transportation as a key challenge in the Riverdale West neighbourhood.
Two-thirds of the council members are women and a similar proportion don’t have citizenship. They began their petition for better HSR service in the fall of 2016 and a few months later Environment Hamilton got involved. Support also came from the bus drivers’ union, the Immigrant Working Centre and the Lightway Church. More recently they have also been meeting with councillor Chad Collins.
Route 56 runs every day of the week but only between 10 am and 8 pm to coincide with the needs of the Walmart store, so the new service into a small section of Riverdale West is far from perfect. But it represents a big achievement for residents who felt ignored and undervalued.
“Ideally, they would have liked to have the proposed bus route implemented before the winter of 2017 to minimize the barriers residents face when accessing public transportation in winter weather conditions such as icy and snow-covered sidewalks, along with the lack of designated pedestrian street crossings,” explains an SPRC report released last month.