The bus taking commuters from the West Shore to downtown Victoria has become the busiest in the region, with a 44 per cent increase in ridership in the past five years, says B.C. Transit.
“We’re carrying over 10,000 people a day on that bus route,” said planning manager James Wadsworth, who attributes much of the increase to the completion of more bus-priority lanes.
New NextRide technology, which lets people find out when a bus is coming, has also helped, Wadsworth said.
“All of these things coming together with the development that’s coming in the West Shore are resulting in real results in terms of transit ridership,” he said.
Time savings for bus riders heading from downtown to Tillicum Road can be 13 to 20 minutes, depending on the time of day, because of the priority bus lanes on Douglas and the Trans-Canada Highway, said Christy Ridout, B.C. Transit vice-president of business development.
That’s up from an estimated 10 minutes of peak-period time savings when the northbound Tolmie Avenue to Burnside Road West/Interurban Road bus lane was completed in December.
Just behind the 50 Langford for usage are the 14 Craigflower, which serves the University of Victoria and Victoria General Hospital, and the No. 27 and 28 buses serving Gordon Head and Shelbourne Street.
Commuter Kristine Rafter said she rides the No. 50 bus regularly, and the bus lanes have shaved about 15 to 20 minutes off her afternoon trip back to Langford.
“The other day I got a ride [in a car] and my bus passed me,” she wrote in an email. “I would have got home faster on the bus.”
That’s one of the “true-blue benefits” of bus lanes now being seen, after years of lanes opening incrementally, Ridout said.
“When you start to see that we’re getting travel-time savings and the buses are going past all the traffic sitting, then that suddenly causes people to say: ‘Hey I can get home faster than in my car.’ ”
That will only get better with time, she said.
“As we make incremental improvements at that end of the corridor, as we start to move up the [highway] and out into the West Shore, we expect that those travel-time savings will increase even further.”
Work is underway on a 2.3-kilometre southbound stretch of bus lane that links Tolmie Avenue to Burnside Road West and Interurban Road.
Wadsworth said there have also been talks with Colwood and View Royal about transit-priority investments.
He said the effect of bus lanes is obvious every afternoon by about 4, when vehicles start to line up on Douglas to wait for the light at Tillicum.
“At the same time, there’s a bus going down the road that’s got 50 to 100 people on it. There’s more people in the bus than there is in the traffic queue that you’ll see here.”
