Updated: Tuesday, September 19. Last night city council voted 6-3 to return to the old transit system. Some councillors stated that they were given wrong information by staff about the new system. The CAO strongly disagreed and offered her resignation. It will take months to revert back to the old system as people will have to be hired, routes changed and more budget amendments needed. There is still no indication from city council what exactly went wrong with the transit rollout.
I spent the last week riding transit to see firsthand the impact of the new changes. Riders do have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. We should recognize that the challenges we face with public transit and the city’s budget were not created overnight. They won’t be solved overnight either. We need to understand how we got here before we can begin to fix these problems.
What was the week like?
I’m not a regular transit rider in Medicine Hat, but I spent years living in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax without a car and used transit in all those cities. But it had been awhile since I had looked at a ride guide to figure out how to get somewhere.
It was emotional for a lot of people. It was clear that transit wasn’t ready for a smooth rollout and the new system is not working as it was designed. However, even when it does begin to work properly the new system adds significant time to many commutes. The new system means longer wait times for transfer and longer walks to and from bus stops.
Yes, only 2-3% of Hatters ride the bus, but that is 1,200-1,800 people who had, and continue to have, serious difficulties getting to work or where they needed to be.
These changes have affected people with the least ability to make alternative arrangements. People that are vulnerable to the systems that we choose and design.
Transfers between lines have been problematic mainly due to the blue and red lines being behind schedule. Transit is aware of this and working on fixing this issue, but for the moment this unpredictability makes it difficult to plan your commute and make connections using the ride guide.
The two main lines, blue and red, run 7 days a week (until 11:30 pm on weekdays and 6:30 pm on weekends), but green, purple and orange, the three feeder routes, stop service at 6:30 during the week and have no weekend service. That does leave large parts of the city without transit on evening and weekends.
It seems that some homeowners weren't notified of new bus stops near their properties. The City should try to be a better community neighbour and communicate better.
These changes have hurt the independence of transit users.
The old system had been in place for a long time. People knew it and were comfortable with it. The city researched, consulted, planned, and rolled out this new plan in 7 months. That’s a tight timetable for any system that has been integrated into the social fabric of a community for so long.
People’s lives were built up around a system that was suddenly very different.
This is what transit hoped to solve with the new system.
Low ridership on some routes meant that those were unsustainable. Most of these routes were evening and weekend routes. $500,000 of the $650,000 in savings under the new system comes from eliminating evenings and weekends.
Creating transfer points across the city rather than only at the terminal is more efficient. You no longer have to travel to the downtown terminal to transfer. But we lose that safe warm place to transfer. That is a trade off with the new system.
And of course the increased efficiency of the new transfer points depends on everything working correctly and things aren’t at the moment.
These issues and questions should be addressed:
The system is supposed to be scalable so we need to know what the scalable options are either to expand accessibility or to return evening and weekend service at least on some level. However, if we do that we need a plan for increasing ridership.
What the infrastructure costs are for the new system? Not just when shelters will be installed, but how much shelters, pads, bus lanes, wheelchair access on curbs and drop off points, signage, benches and garbage cans will cost.
Updating the bus schedule for the red and blue lines.
The city received grants for transit from the provincial and federal government. What are the conditions and plans for that money?
What will happen to the terminal, another vacant building in our downtown core, and how will this affect business in the area?
Medicine Hat is growing, but needs to decide if it wants to be a town or a city. Yes, transit costs money and for people who have never taken transit it’s hard to think of transit as an essential service, but it is. There are many reasons why people use transit, some optional and some not (like medical conditions that could prevent any one of us from driving at any time).
It's also more than that. It drives economic growth. Living near a bus stop or subway station are pretty coveted locations in other cities. It also builds communities by connecting different parts of cities. Of course, this won't happen until we stop seeing transit as only for the poor and those with special needs. In large cities everyone rides transit, but transit is usually also the most effective way of getting around. So here in Medicine Hat we have a classic chicken and egg scenario. People won't use transit until it's convenient. But we won't fund it until people use it. So how do we make this transition? I don't know.
It's hard to know what steps to take next because there is a lot of conflicting information out there. But there does seem to be a lot of people struggling with the consequences of this transit rollout. We should have a healthy debate about how much to cut or spend on transit, but the system needs to be usable and predictable. We’ve got work to do to get things to this point.
What is city council's role regarding transit?
Last December city council approved a concept for increasing ridership, improved access and lowering costs. That's a tall order. However, it seems that the primary reason for this change is to save money. There is nothing wrong with cost cutting. But such changes should be thoughtfully implemented. And city council should be up front that the primary reason for this change is to save money.
The new system saves $650,000/year. There are arguably aspects of the new system that improve transit, but $500,000 of the savings comes from eliminating evening and weekend bus service, as the CAO said a few weeks ago.
So, if the plan was a good one, why did council immediately reverse itself last Tuesday, September 5 (the first day of the new system) and ask staff to explore options for expanding evening and weekend service? That seems to be an implicit admission that they did not adequately vet this new system.
Closing the budget gap requires tough choices. It also requires thoughtful and creative planning. This past week underscores the danger when council rushes decisions and fails to adequately plan for big changes.
How did we get here?
Development.
Medicine Hat has low population density and a large geographic area. It’s hard to deliver effective, cheap transit to a city like ours.
There is nothing wrong with this type of development, but it does come with certain consequences. First building and maintaining infrastructure (roads, sewer, water, electricity) is very expensive and are the essential services for a city. The more spread out a city the higher the infrastructure costs. The more spread out a city the more fire stations we need to maintain a fast response time. The more snowplows to clear the roads. The more buses.
To fix the underlying issue we need to rethink the way new neighourhoods are designed. Until we begin to change how this city develops we will continue to see the same problems--the costs of infrastructure will keep increasing meaning less money for all other services. Creating a city that's easily serviced by transit will require long term consistent decision making by many successive councils with an eye towards transit orientated development.
Updated Saturday, September 16: Tim Machan brought up a good point—'people don't want smaller residential lots. That's why Desert Blume is blooming'. Yes, people don't want smaller lots, but I think transit orientated development is less about lot size than the way neighbourhoods are laid out. We need a variety of housing options and bigger lots are one of the advantages of living in Medicine Hat. But we can still design things better.
The origins of our budget deficit.
Medicine Hat owns a natural gas company. The profits from that company have been returned to the city for decades. We have used this money to offset our taxes. Thus we have received more services than we have paid for out of pocket. We’ve had low taxes, some of the lowest in the province, (We still have some of the lowest taxes in the province.) while having great services. For example, most cities our size have two outdoor pools. We have four. We have the most ice sheets per capita than other comparable Alberta cities.
The money from our natural gas dividend disappeared a couple of years ago. So much, so quickly that we suddenly were faced with a $23 million deficit in 2015. This year it's $15 million.
Some people have blamed city councillors or city staff for bad planning, but we all bear responsibility. When the money was flowing few of us thought of making difficult decisions to create a more sustainable financial foundation for the city. Now we must bear the consequences. But it's a tragedy that the most vulnerable parts of our community were the first to be affected.
Closing the budget gap.
The question of how to deal with this shortfall is one of the defining issues for this election. The current conversation over transit is one aspect of this debate. Financially Fit for the Future is the current council’s plan for fixing our budget. It depends on cutting some services, increasing fees for services and using reserves to bridge us to ease the shock of service cuts or higher taxes.
The principles behind the plan are reasonable, but there are problems with some aspects. First it is based on a survey that cannot be said to be reflective of the city overall. The survey was completed by 3,000 residents, but I have not seen documentation indicating whether this is a representative sample. Therefore you cannot logically conclude that the results are reflective of the overall city.
Leadership in a democracy is a tricky thing. It’s a balancing act between following the will of the people and persuading others to a course of action you suggest. Regarding our current budget deficit city council is in the best position to suggest a plan to fix our budget. They understand city operations better than residents. That’s what we elect them for. Asking us what we should do is an abdication of responsibility and my main objection to the survey.
The survey also made us pit city services against each other. Should we cut transit or the arts or police or firefighters? But this is a false choice. A well-balanced city needs all of these things. We all benefited from the boom years, now we must all make sacrifices.
The question isn’t should we have emergency services, or roads, or culture or buses, but at what level should we have them and can we plan effectively to deliver them?
Planning effectively.
Small and big decisions can have long term effects. Building Canalta may not seem to directly affect transit, but it does. Curbside recycling has nothing to do with transit except that it also used a problematic survey to make its case. The city’s opportunities and challenges are all interconnected. When we make mistakes in one area it affects others.
I’ve been attending council meetings for three years and here are some decisions that highlight the difficulty in effective planning.
The new Canalta Centre was built on the outskirts of town over the recommendations of the planning department. I believe this was an expensive mistake. Don’t get me wrong the building is beautifully built, but putting such an important civic building on the edge of town exacerbates the sprawl of the city. There is a reason why every new stadium in cities across North America are being returned to their downtown. Continuing developments like Canalta will keep transit expensive or ineffective.
Bylaw 4367. This small zoning decision approved Gordon Law Office’s move from downtown into a former residential property in the Herald neighbourhood. In doing so council went against their own brand new neighbourhood plan for Herald. We have great long term plans for the city, but council needs to stick them. Creating a city that's easily serviced by transit will require long term consistent decision making by many successive councils.
Curbside recycling. Last year council approved a new curbside recycling program for Medicine Hat. Of course recycling is important and if we can increase diversion of materials headed to the landfill that’s great. But the devil is always in the details. Once again one of the city’s main rationale for implementing curbside recycling is another survey that found that most Hatters want curbside recycling. They took great pains to describe the methodological rigor of this survey. Yet some of the survey’s own findings undercut the need for curbside pick up. In the Executive Summary 88% of respondents said that “they either recycle everything or almost everything”. The survey is purported to have a confidence level of 95% +/- 3.21%. In other words we should be able to project these findings to the entire community. But if this is the case the implementation of curbside recycling will have a minimal impact on waste diversion since the vast majority of Hatters already recycle everything or almost everything. So either the survey is wrong in which case it’s not clear what residents want, or the survey is right and curbside won’t have any significant effect on diversion rates.
Finally the recent transit backtrack. This, unfortunately, was a good example of the serious costs when we fail to adequately make strategic choices. When council backtracked last week on the brand new transit plan it showed a lack of due diligence on the part of council and has had enormous negative consequences for those that depend on this service.
I sympathize with councillors. It’s a brutal, difficult job. I write for the Medicine Hat News and have written columns on some of these issues. But it can take me hours, weeks and months to figure out the history and context for certain decisions. The city is a massive operation and keeping up with the nuances of city operation requires an extraordinary investment in time and energy.
“We are facing a unique situation in generations—the first election since our golden goose has died. Perhaps it’s time for new ways of doing things.”