Despite citizen demands for improvement, the HSR is not expected to provide any relief for the growing road congestion afflicting the Hamilton area for at least the next five years. Projections released this week show transit ridership declining both this year and next, and only reaching its 2016 share of commuter trips by 2024. However it is projected to climb once the LRT is in place.
HSR provided just one out of every 15 Hamilton morning commuter trips in 2016. That share is expected to fall this year, and dip even further in each of the next two years before slowly climbing back to the 2016 level six years from now.
By that point ridership will have gone up by just 1800 in the peak morning commute while total trips will have risen by nearly 27,000. That almost certainly means thousands of additional cars on city streets and expressways and significantly worse congestion on the 403 and the QEW.
The HSR predictions are being used to calculate the amount of development fees that can be charged to support the purchase of buses and other transit capital projects. The lower the city’s expectations of transit use, the less that can be collected from future residential, commercial and industrial growth projects.
The calculations show just over 900 LRT riders in the morning rush hour in its first year or partial year of operation in 2025. That triples in the following two years and by 2030 helps to push the total transit share of the morning commute to one in nine trips. Substantial growth in HSR ridership is also forecast but only once the LRT is in place.
Transit use in Hamilton has been stuck for well over a decade while other Ontario cities have been recording significant growth. Between 2006 and 2014, Hamilton’s ridership only grew by five percent and since then has declined every year. If that pattern continues this year as the projections suggest, it will be the seventh year in the last decade that HSR ridership has actually gone down.
The latest projections only report the morning rush hour numbers but they show ridership drops last year, this year, and next year before a slight recovery in 2020. And that still doesn’t even get back to last year’s HSR use.
That contrasts sharply with what’s happening elsewhere in the province. Waterloo and Durham regions both have recorded increases in transit use exceeding 50 percent and Brampton has more than doubled its ridership since 2006. All have substantially increased investment in their transit systems. That doesn’t seem to have happened in Hamilton where funding has actually fallen.
The Environment Hamilton advocacy group says that “when adjusted for inflation, the City of Hamilton invested in $83.85 million into transit in 1994, $61.15 million in 2005, and only $59.02 million in 2016”. It wants transit funding to be an issue in the municipal election now underway.
Specifically, the group is calling for an end to the variable taxation arrangement known as area rating that sees residents of the former city pay approximately three times the transit tax rate as those who live in the urbanized parts of the former suburbs of Ancaster, Dundas, Waterdown and Stoney Creek.
The group believes the absence of a single transit tax rate on all the urban areas of Hamilton is one of the main reasons for HSR underfunding and underperformance, and that it is also blocking needed improvements. One result is very limited service in the former suburbs and a failure to install HSR routes where new growth is occurring.
“Unlike virtually all other Ontario municipalities, due to area rating for transit, when a new development is built in Hamilton public transit service is not planned for the soon-to-be community,” argues Environment Hamilton.