Cities with world-renowned, reliable public transit, like London, Paris and New York City, on the other hand, share a something in common — they have underground subways that do not have to interface with factors that can render Calgary Transit impotent — weather, traffic and pedestrians. Encounters with such factors can jam up entire legs of the C-Train with consequences to the whole system.

While sending the C-Train underground is unrealistic, other cities have taken some fairly straightforward measures to make transit independent of traffic resulting in less congestion and more efficient service. Ottawa has set up bus-only roads, while other cities like Kingston and Chicago have bus-only lanes and others still, have high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to ensure transit will get riders home quicker than cars. Calgary, meanwhile, only has one short stretch of an HOV lane located on Centre Street North. Instead of going ahead with more HOV lanes right away to catch up with other municipalities, the city will be doing a study on best practices in North America and Europe. The study is going to a committee and then to council for review.

While competing with traffic restricts the efficiency of transit, outdated trip planning features further compromise reliability. Trip planning features like the phone-in Teleride system and Calgary Transit’s website do not give a real-time account of when the next bus or train will arrive. Both simply regurgitate the schedule and don’t respond to weather, mechanical or traffic delays. Other cities, meanwhile, are using up-to-date technologies like the “NextBus” system, which uses GPS technology to determine the location of a given bus. It combines this information with typical traffic patterns to estimate the bus’s arrival time at a given stop. The information is outputted onto LED signs at bus stops and is also available via cell phone, PDA and the Internet. Cities like San Francisco, Guelph, Washington and Seattle have already adopted NextBus, with others like Toronto and even Banff recently jumping on board.
 
In a city like Calgary that has seen snow in every month of the year and temperatures that can drop below - 40C, such a system would make sense. When I asked two spokespeople from Calgary Transit about future plans for better trip planning features, neither had heard of the NextBus system or could speak to any plans to increase the responsiveness of current trip planning features.

While the city contends it has recently purchased 300 new buses and another 38 C-Train cars, many communities still lack regular service, feeder service is limited and rush hour service is overcrowded. One of the core reasons for this is we’ve been spreading our transit resources thin over an ever-sprawling city.

Compact cities make it easier and much more economical to build effective public transportation systems. A paper published in November by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute entitled Planning Principles and Practices, points to smart growth principles (more compact, mixed, multi-modal land use) as a way to better support efficient public transportation. Litman says, “During much of the last century there was a self-reinforcing cycle of increased vehicle ownership and use, reduced travel options and more automobile-oriented land use development.”

Historically, the city has invested heavily in roads, supporting the single-occupant vehicle. Plan It Calgary, a new 100-year urban sustainability plan that integrates land use and mobility planning is going to help change our ways, but the effects of this new way of planning communities — recognizing for the first time that development plans and transportation plans are inextricably linked — likely won’t be felt for many years to come.

In line with the plan, the city has allocated 55 per cent of its transportation budget towards transit now, which falls short of Sustainable Calgary’s recommendations of a minimum 65 per cent, but still marks a positive change in momentum.

Forbes, using data and research supplied by Jeffrey Kenworthy, a transportation professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, recently named 10 cities it deems to have the world’s best commutes. Hong Kong, China got top marks because it “is one of the densest and geographically smallest cities in the world.”

Changing the way we think about getting around in Calgary is going to be an uphill battle though. Calgarians have the highest car ownership rates per capita in Canada. And with so many drivers, traffic complaints are perennial.

The intuitive response to such complaints is to build another interchange or another road, but that doesn’t solve the problem. The real solutions are counter-intuitive — investing more in public transit and alternatives rather than building more roads.

Research, including that of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, indicates while building more roads only results in more traffic, improving public transit alleviates congestion. Traffic mimics gas, in that it will expand to fill whatever new space it is given. The American Public Transportation Association says increased public transit reduces the investment required for expansion of roadways, and that an urban rail system provides more capacity than a six-lane freeway.

Keeping Calgarians in their cars and further marginalizing transit riders, a recently implemented $3 per day parking fee at end-of-the-line C-Train stations (the rest will be converted in the coming months) offers another disincentive to hop aboard. The fee will raise an estimated $4.5 million per year in revenue that far exceeds the budget for the security and maintenance of Park and Ride.

Drivers and transit riders alike will benefit from heavy investment in public transit and incentives to ride rather than drive. Until transit becomes a viable alternative to the single-occupant vehicle, though, Calgarians will be left with a compromised transit system that’s making a victim of the car-less, converting transit enthusiasts to drivers and keeping drivers in their cars.