Buses are the workhorses of the transit network. However, traffic congestion greatly affects the speed and reliability of buses and also increases the cost of providing transit service. This reduces the amount of service that TransLink can provide.
Heres what we’re doing to help:
Bus Stop Balancing involves carefully consolidating or removing bus stops that are too close together, in order to improve travel times and reliability for bus customers. As the name suggests, Bus Stop Balancing aims for a balance between convenient access and effective service.
Bus bulbs are sidewalk extensions that allow buses to serve customers from the travel lane. Bus bulbs improve travel time and reliability by eliminating delays caused by merging into and out of the travel lane at bus stops. Bus bulbs also create more space for waiting, walking, and physical distancing.
Small changes can make a big difference to bus delay. For example, adding turn lanes, restricting turns where turn lanes are not available, and giving buses easy access to the front of the queue can significantly improve travel times and reliability for our customers.
Bus lanes are traffic lanes which are reserved for buses, marked by signage or paint. They can sometimes include other specific road users such as cyclists and HOV users. Bus lanes may operate during peak periods or all day.
TransLink’s Bus Speed & Reliability Report summarizes the impacts of bus delay on both customers and operations. It identifies the causes of delay, profiles corridors with significant potential for improvement, and outlines the roles of TransLink and our municipal partners in addressing this burden on the region's transit system. The 2023 Report is an update and expansion of the original 2019 report; it is being released in parts.
When buses are slowed by traffic, it affects the lives of our customers, who make more trips by bus than all other transit modes combined. These delays also cost TransLink over $80 million per year, simply to maintain bus frequencies.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Bus Priority Infrastructure, which reviews previous efforts, and remaining opportunities, to improve bus performance.
For a more screen-reader friendly version of the 2023 Bus Speed & Reliability report, please refer to the list of individual parts in PDF format.
As a complement to the first Bus Speed and Reliability Report, TransLink created a Transit Priority Toolkit.
The Transit Priority Toolkit provides TransLink and municipal partners with specific ways to improve travel time and reliability of transit service ranging from new designs for streets and bus stops to strategies for managing curbs, traffic, and signals.
Both documents serve as guidance for TransLink and municipal partners to address region-wide bus speed and reliability for the more than 700,000 customers who ride the bus each day.
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