Experiences with the new 445 bus
La Presse did an even-handed assessment of the 445, the new express bus on Papineau. Most riders like it – for some folks who live in Rosemont and work downtown it’s perfect.
Drivers on Papineau, on the whole, are peeved about giving up an entire lane on the busy side at rush hour.
Joey 09:21 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
I guess you could call it even-handed, though it wouldn’t have been too difficult to do break out the stopwatch and see how slowly traffic was actually moving. My anecdotal contribution to the discussion is that la rentrée is in full effect – traffic everywhere, in all directions, all the time, has been much worse this week than last. Summer’s over.
Frédéric 10:28 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
The photo shown under the 7 h 40 subtitle has been my usual experience while riding on the 45, going south in the evening, before the reserved lane was opened. There seems to be a lane where cars cannot go, but it is not wide enough for the bus to move on, so it is stuck with car trafic. Seeing this false bus lane while spending 5 to 10 minutes from one stop to the next was really frustrating and confusing. I really hope this situation improved, both in the morning and in the evening.
EmilyG 10:44 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
I took the bus from downtown to my place once. I found it a really nice experience.
There’s a whole lot of traffic on de Lorimier street, though, where the bus runs northward in the evening. So it takes longer than the metro, as several people mentioned in the article, but as the people mentioned, I found it a nice, non-crowded experience. Much better than having to sit on the floor of a crowded metro car.
Kate 12:20 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Someone I don’t know had a cromulent comment on Twitter in response to this:
Always funny how they put the 2 sides as equal. Except they are not. For the space of 2 cars, you get 50 people in the bus. “Oh it’s impossible to drive here”. It’s not for the 50 people in the bus, WTF.
Ian 18:45 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Well yes but then you’re riding not driving, which brings me to my next question about the vagaries of language, why do we “ride” bikes? Is it the motorized aspect? If so, does one ride or drive an e-bike?
In any case anyone that takes the Pap for their driving commute already knows it sucks, taking out a lane for buses isn’t going to make it much worse especially since it includes some people who might otherwise be driving.
Ian 19:10 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
…another thing worth thinking about though is that everyone loves floating the 1 bus equals 50 people not driving cars thing but let’s also remember buses only come every 10-15 minutes at best, and 50 cars pass in about 1 minute, so actually there are way more people getting from point A to point B if you rely on cars so it’s a way more effective use of road space unless your primary goal is that the buses are on time and your public transit system is seen as improved. It would be great if we could eliminate wait times on buses or at least reduce them but as we have seen over the last few years the STM is increasingly befuddled as to what to do about it.
I really wish I could rely on the STM to get to work on time but I’ll be dead honest, I totally don’t miss waiting at a bus stop 15 minutes or more in the dead of winter every single workday while some jackoff idles his bus 50 feet from me but won’t let me on because it’s the end of the line.
To be honest though even if there were an extra 45 minutes on my commute, it would still be faster and more reliable than taking the bus.
Faiz Imam 19:18 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Not really ian.
Any decent reserved bus route will be designed not for one bus, but for many.
I’m not sure how many buses run on Papineau, but its at least 5 buses, and i’m pretty sure one runs every couple minutes.
All to say, if you actually stand there and count vehicles, a bus lane carries significantly more human bodies than a lane of cars.
A lane of cars carries about 2000 people per hour. a decently busy bus lane can do 10,000 people per hour.
Its not close.
Ian 19:29 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Fair enough, I was thinking of Parc where only the Parc bus runs.
Ian 19:53 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
I’d love to see where you’re getting those numbers from, by the way – I’ve been seeing more along the lines of up to 2,500 cars (hypothetically, but more like 5-600 given traffic lights etc) vs about 1000 people in a bus lane (hypothetically, assuming a full articulated bus every 5 minutes ) but I’d be happy to stand corrected.
Let’s say that you had a full 50 person bus every 5 minutes, that’s fewer than 1000 people. Let’s say you had a 50 person bus every minute (impossible, but let’s say) that’s only 3,000 people. Where are you getting 10k from?
Faiz Imam 20:14 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
you’re right, 10k is a max number. Just a transit planning rule of thumb when thinking about BRT lanes, 10k is about the maximum normal buses can do.
a 40ft bus packed to the doors can hold around 75 people so 133 buses an hour(or just over 2 buses a minute) gets you to about 10,000. And a bus every 30seconds is about the max possible in a trunk line, and even that is a stretch.
Actual numbers in Montreal are less, though I don’t have numbers off the top of my head.
But the maximum theoretical saturation capacity per hour of a lane of cars is a well known value, I just looked it up. Its 1,900 to 2,000 vehicles per hour per lane.(so about 2500 bodies)
Thing thing to consider about this situation is that an efficient bus lane does not look full. A full bus passing every minute or so down an empty lane seems like a waste of space, especially next to a lane packed with cars. But in fact its apparent emptiness is a consequence of how well it works, and also how poorly cars work at moving people.
Ian 20:27 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
“Actual numbers in Montreal are less”…Hahaha no kidding! A completely full bus every 30 seconds on Papineau? Please, that’s dreaming in technicolour.
A bus every 30 seconds? Come on, man. You can’t seriously be using that as a talking point.
Faiz Imam 20:45 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
As I said when I corrected myself, its a theoretical max, just like 2000 cars an hour (this number is also rarely reached since drivers are often driving sub-optimally)
Point is, as long as you have a full 40′ bus passing every ~2.5mins or better, then a reserved bus lane is carrying more people than a pure car lane. Throw in the occasional articulated bus, and that number increases to almost 4 mins.
ant5n 21:16 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Back in 2011, the 45 bus alone had 18K trips a day. With the express bus, and some growth, I’d guess there’s probably 20-25K trips a day now. A lot of this ridership is in the rush hour direction, and knowing that peaks can be very significant, I’d guess the maximum throughput is probably 2,000-2,500 pphd. Given that the 45 and 445 run at about 10 buses in the peak direction each, that’s 20 buses per hour with 100-125 passengers each.
Jack 09:57 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
Thats why I like this blog. I learn stuff, thanks.
Ian 11:03 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
Okay so let’s just accept these wild estimates getting thrown around for the sake of conversation –
20 buses with 110-ish passengers each (despite the fact that articulated buses only hold about 75 people max) is still only 2200, basically in line with how many people would get moved by cars in rush hour according to other estimates offered in this conversation, as optimal road lane use is designed around the ability to throughput a minimum of 1900 vehicles per hour.
Point being I think we can agree that the whole “buses are far more efficient than cars” is only hypothetically true, when you look at actual transit schedules on super busy routes it’s about the same as cars even if you tweak the numbers.
If I worked downtown I would way rather take the bus than drive for a multitude of reasons, but that it’s a more efficient use of road space is not one of them. The reason we have dedicated bus lanes is not because buses are more efficient, but because it’s almost impossible for them to stay on schedule in rush hour traffic otherwise as they can only drop off and pick up passengers in one lane, and if there is anything else in that lane it slows them down.
Filp 16:35 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
Ian, I think you’re misunderstanding the efficiency part. No need to get caught up in the exact numbers. The bus lane is already far more efficient. The fact that a seemingly “empty” lane can carry as many (or close to as many) people as a jam packed snail paced car lane, is the efficiency part. It is an efficient use of road space because, well, it barely used any of the lane capacity at all, while still carrying as many people. There’s still plenty of capacity to scale up the bus service in an “empty” lane, whereas the regular car lane is maxed out and full.
Faiz Imam 18:15 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
“despite the fact that articulated buses only hold about 75 people max”
It would be better if you got your facts straight before getting into this argument.
A normal 40ft bus has seats for around 30-40 people, and crush capacity of around 75.
A articulated bus has seating for about 70, and crush capacity of about 115.
I will agree with you on your last line though: “if there is anything else in that lane it slows them down”
Yup, and this is why we need dedicated lanes to actually improve flow.
Right now much of the bus network is bursting to capacity during rush hour. One issue is that we don’t have enough buses, but even if we had more, we can’t use them because they get stuck in congestion.
If we want to increase capacity of our bus networks, the only way to do that is to have mroe reserved lanes, if not fully featured “BRT” like we have on Pie-ix (which btw serves *on average* 32,000 people a day.
That’s 1600 people an hour on an average hour of the day and an average day of the week. almost hitting the same level as most car lanes.
dwgs 18:42 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
There also has to be a will to maintain those lanes. When they instituted the express lane on Sherbrooke in NDG a few years ago there were cops and tow trucks every morning to clear the lanes. After a while that changed to cops giving tickets pretty regularly and you would sometimes see a tow truck. Now there’s a parked car blocking the lane about every three or four blocks on average and hardly ever a ticket to be seen. People also do stuff like park in the bus lane, put on the four way flashers, and go to pick up their dry cleaning, run into the dep etc.
ant6n 19:11 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
In terms of estimates, my first estimate based on daily ridership was that theres a peak throughout of ~3000 pphd, which I rounded down since I don’t believe the buses are actually at such crush capacity. I’d say at frequencies of 5 minutes, a bus land starts carrying more ppl than a car lane — and that’s still a pretty low frequency, many bus lanes are operated at higher peak frequencies.
But the question which carries more ppl shouldn’t be the only deciding factor. After all, we want to encourage the use of public transit, so it has to be competitive to driving. And in the case of the 445, the bus has to be competitive to the orange line, in order to actually shift passengers away from the metro onto the bus.
I’d say it’s likely that once the stm will get more buses, and after some time off people getting used to the new service, the frequencies on papineau will increase to higherter than 20bph, and then the bus lane will very obviously carry much more people than an equivalent car lane would.
Mark Côté 19:25 on 2019-08-31 Permalink
dwgs Huh you think so? I take the 105 at rush hour several times a week and don’t recall the bus having to go around cars very often. But I admit I’m not paying really close attention.
Chris 18:05 on 2019-09-01 Permalink
There are other metrics to consider. Like how much GHG per person per km. I bet buses win that easily.
Ian 07:33 on 2019-09-03 Permalink
That’s really not the point, nobody disputes that. The argument here is whether buses are really a more efficient use of the road space in terms of getting people around.
By way of example. as with most morning on my way driving out to Saint Anne, I passed a mostly empty articulated 80 bus on Parc with an ad on it saying “this bus = 70 cars” (in French of course) and while there are definitely 70 cars on that stretch of Parc every 10 minutes as per the bus schedule, since they all had drivers we can safely guess they were moving more people than the mostly empty bus.
But whatever, unless we get some real numbers in here we are just going to be throwing anecdata and educated guesses back and forth, and it’s pretty obvious that pretty much everyone here has their minds made up that reserved lanes and more buses are the way to go simply because cars are “bad”.