Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin hopes the city will be able to retrofit its downtown parking machines to allow them to sell bus passes.
“I think it’s an awesome idea,” Fortin said Thursday, adding that from the preliminary discussions he’s had with city staff, he believes the potential is there.
“The devil’s in the details,” said Fortin, a member of the Victoria Regional Transit Commission.
“We need to see if we can integrate the transit system with the parking service. If we can, what an awesome customer-service opportunity. … You could buy your bus day-pass or a one-way [ticket] at any meter.”
Fortin said he’s asked B.C. Transit staff to meet with city staff to explore the idea and plans to bring it up at the next transit commission meeting.
The city replaced the bulk of its 1,900 parking meters in 2009 with 270 solar-powered parking stations that accept coins, credit cards and city-issued smart cards.
“If we have these machines already, then as a transit commission, why would we want to spend money investing in dispensers if the City of Victoria has already got them?” Fortin said.
Fortin thinks the idea would dovetail with all-door loading of passengers on buses if B.C. Transit decides to introduce the step as a time-saving measure. In order to allow passengers to load from both the front and back doors, they have to be able to pre-pay for their passes.
Meanwhile, councillors gave approval in principle to a transit proposal that would see peak-hour bus lanes introduced on the Douglas Street corridor for exclusive use of transit during morning and evening rush hours (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.).
Fortin said introducing the time-limited bus lanes on Douglas Street has the potential to shave four minutes off a typical bus ride. If other transit priority measures such as queue-jumper lanes and optimizing traffic signals can be implemented, there’s potential to cut 10 to 12 minutes off a commute.
Fortin said those time savings will translate into more buses being available for use throughout the region. “The difficulty that we have is we have buses trapped in congestion. Those buses have to run on time, so we have more buses running, for lack of a better term, inefficiently,” Fortin said.
“So if we can get them out and we can get more people on a single bus, that allows us to distribute those buses to other places.”
Coun. Geoff Young said he strongly supports the idea, but noted a similar proposal four or five years ago was sidelined after concerns were raised by a group of Douglas Street merchants about elimination of parking stalls and turning opportunities.
Transit staff say infrastructure such as parking stalls and cycling lanes would largely be unaffected by this proposal.
Coun. Chris Coleman called the potential per-trip time savings “extraordinary.”
“This is an enormous increased benefit to the community as a whole and to the commuter using it,” Coleman said.
Others agreed.
“It sounds like not very much — 10 or 12 minutes,” said Coun. Marianne Alto, who also sits on the transit commission.
“But as a very frequent transit user myself, I can tell you that would make a huge difference when you’re travelling from one point to another and it will take me and others out of my car more and more frequently.”
