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416-993-4953

32 Grenville Street M4Y 1A3

Christopher Greaves

Metrobus - Overview

In October 2017 I flew to St John’s with a plan to drive all over the island and spend two days exploring the city of St John’s by public transit. You can visit the Metrobus website , as I did prior to leaving Toronto. The driving part of my trip went very well. I covered over 6,000 Km of highway as you can read here and was well received wherever I went.

Then I asked Metrobus for a system map and everything went downhill.

The fares weren’t too bad – ten rides at seniors rate is eighteen dollars, and the card can be recharged at a few selected retail outlets.

My problem is that I like to study a printed map, the sort that unfolds and annoys the heck out of other passengers.

With a hard-copy full-size printed map I can plan city-wide trips from my motel room, and determine (with the help of printed time schedules), which routes connect with the least time delay.

I am not planning a trip as Public Transit see it – I do not want to get from the car rental agency to the hospital or from my home to the library. I don’t know where I want to go, sometimes until I am sitting on a bus and a fellow-passenger suggests a place to go: “You can get off here and catch a number seventy-two that will take you to ...”

I saw a printed map, exactly what I wanted, mounted on the wall in the Visitors Information centre in downtown St John’s. They had one, but none to hand out. Try the Metrobus Administration building which means a drive out towards Clarenville. A spot so isolated that it is not served by regular bus routes.

Think about that.

I drove out there by rented car to see how to use the bus system, but although Metrobus has a printed map mounted on the wall, they don’t have printed maps to hand out. Or to sell, for I flashed a wallet full of Canadian twenty-dollar notes.

I don’t believe that Metrobus printed only two copies of the map. I will bet that every mid-level manager has a copy pinned to the wall of their office.

So why not print an extra twenty maps to hand out or sell to people who are keen to learn the bus system? Tourists, newcomers, people whose English is not so good. A paper map serves as a vehicle of communication between people who need help (me) and fellow passengers. With a printed map I can be shown “We are here” and “Here is where you want to be”, and “This is how to get there”.

The Metrobus staff said that there was a copy of the system map on the web , and I thought to go there and download a copy and take it to a print shop, but I could not download an image. The system map is interactive, and you can zoom into a small section at any one time, but you cannot obtain the large-size image that Metrobus employees can pin to their office walls.

And if you don’t have an employer-funded smart-phone plan, you can’t see where you need to go interactively out in the street, or while you are traveling on the bus.

An interactive map is of little use to a person exploring a new city. The detailed zoom window shows only a part of the city, and does not show how it fits into the area as a whole.

And anyway, not everybody has a smart-phone with unlimited access.

So I collected a copy of the schedule for each one of the thirty routes and took them back to the motel room for study.

These printed schedules have problems. There is nothing quite like designing tools that are supposed to help, and embedding hurdles to use within the tools.

In reading the notes which follow, lease bear in mind that:-

(1) I am/was seventy-odd years old and have been exploring public ransit in many cities around the world.

(2) I was a tourist in St John’s, planning to get to know the city on this my first visit. I beieve that my aims were no less than a new arrivale, a job-seeker, a visitor, anyone with a desire to get to know the layout and content of the city in a short period.

(3) I did NOT ride any bus while I was there. I gave up and went for a drive. The bus system might work very well. I have found everymember of ground staff (drivers, clerks, agents etc) helpful in every transit system I have studied. I believe that had I mounted a bus, the driver would have been as helpful as any driver I have questioned in Southern Ontario, Pittsburgh, the Île de France, and so on.

(4) If my comments come across as petulant it is because I get sulky when I don’t get what I want, expect, or need.

(5) You can pin the blame for my disappointment on me. I should have enquired about full-size printed maps months before I went. (I’d been planning this trip for two years). Had I issued a simple email request I would have learned that no large-scale full-size printed maps were provided, and also learned that there was no printable map on the web site.

(6) That said, you can’t pin the blame for what I perceive as bad design of the couple of dozen printed schedules, which is all I can rely on to evaluate the Metrobus System in St John’s Newfoundland.

Even the Toronto Transit Commission in Toronto has made its printed transit maps worse year by year. No longer do the maps show individual streets, and the tendency is to reduce the maps to something like the London Underground schematic map, with just coloured lines and little else. Nobody is perfect. It’s just that St John’s is sliding down to Toronto’s abysmmal standard.

St John’s is not a large city. You can walk the entire downtown core in under forty minutes. You can drive from one side to the other in about fifteen minutes. There is no excuse for having a bus service that appears to service this small uncongested area so poorly. Except, perhaps, apathy.

416-993-4953 CPRGreaves@gmail.com

Toronto, Saturday, November 24, 2018 11:43 AM