Efficiency will drive us out of transit problem
By Letter to the Editor on April 30, 2021.
Editor: Over the past several months, the Lethbridge Transparency Council has observed that the majority of City of Lethbridge buses are driving around empty, or with only a handful of riders.Â
 Figures from City sources indicate that a fleet of 42 buses (about 36 passenger capacity each) operate on 14 routes, logging around 970,000 kilometres per year. 40% of these are spares.
 In 2005, Lethbridge Transit had an annual ridership of 2,555,695 passengers on 25 buses. Expenses for the same year amounted to $6,023,794. With revenues of $2,243,222, the net cost to the taxpayer was $3,780,572 or $1.47 per passenger per ride.
 By 2017 ridership had dropped to 1,200,000 passengers, a decrease of 1,355,695 (53 per cengt). In 2017, expenses amounted to $13,936,205, revenues were $4,152,971, and the resulting net cost to the taxpayer was $9,783,234. This is an increase of $6,002,662 or 158 per cent. Taxpayer cost per passenger ballooned to $8.15 per passenger per ride! Of note is that $9,472,241 (67 per cent) of the 2017 expenses were for wages and benefits. We do not believe this amount to be sustainable.
 Stantec (who authored the Lethbridge Transit Master Plan in 2017) and the KPMG Operational Review both reported that the average usage was 14 rides per hour in Lethbridge. Peer transit systems in other communities average 25 rides per hour. In the actual community comparisons, Lethbridge is at the bottom of the list.
Stantec also acknowledged that two Lethbridge routes carry 40 per cent of all riders. This would indicate that the other routes are operating well below the 14 rides per hour average. This is all happening on 40-foot buses (capacity 36-38 passengers) costing $620,000 each.
 The city transit manager was quoted on Global in July 2020 as saying that ridership was running at 12 per cent of normal because of COVID, which would be about 132,000 riders per year. It is our understanding service levels were not reduced during COVID, which would translate to the tax-payer an approximate cost of $102.97 per passenger per trip. This is a short-term accentuation of a clear problem.
 Through the draft Capital Improvement Program, the City is wanting an additional $29,230,000 for: new transit terminals ($3,967,000), new heated bus shelters ($5,450,000), and electric Buses and charging infrastructure ($19,813,000).
 The first order of business would be to re-establish ridership levels. The City of Edmonton has estimated it will take two years for ridership to recover to pre-COVID levels. Why would we be trying to change to electric buses now? Judging from our evaluation, we should be trying to gain efficiency, not spend our way out of the problem.
Have your voice heard! Please complete the City of Lethbridge CIP survey by April 28 at https://lethbridgecipbudget.ethelo.net/page/welcome, and be sure to comment on these proposed transit expenditures. You can also contact 311 to state your opinion on empty buses. Finally, tell council no more 40-foot limos!
We can do better!
Irwin Wyrostok
Lethbridge Transparency Council
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Thank you for your letter of expose. I often wonder why the city did not adopt using 12 or 15 passenger buses and run them on 15 minute intervals. I lived in Calgary for 2 years and always traveled on buses that ran at 15 minute schedule and were convenient as well as timely to get me anywhere in the city.
The writer’s exhortation to complete the CIP survey would be a good one, if only the Herald hadn’t obviously hung on to the letter past the deadline for doing so. Others have pointed out the ridiculously short window for public input; I echo.
A few notes here. First, transit operations were curtailed in the face of COVID. From April 8 to August 4 of 2020 Lethbridge Transit stopped all routes and operated only on a reservation system for “essential travel” (which was free to those who used it, by the way). Regular routes (and fares) were reintroduced, in August, but certain changes emanating from the Transit Master Plan were introduced. The Council was supposed to consider further service reductions in light of continued poor ridership during the pandemic, but that was October and I don’t recall hearing anything more about it.
Where do the numbers come from for the ridership figures dating back to 2005? They seem suspect. The KPMG report noted ridership figures before the 2017 Stantec-authored Master Plan were unreliable (based on estimates, while 2017 numbers relied on automated counting system started in that year). There was an AE-authored Master Plan dated in 2011 that noted ridership counts were estimated by the City and were unreliable. AE attempted to survey the use over a short time period but their figures were double-counted (i.e. they counted every embarkation and disembarkation, forgetting that one person does both). They did not match the City estimates and, if you take ½ the total from AE as one ride, the ridership figures look to me to be very similar to what we have now (approximating the 14 rides per hour rate). Both Stantec and KPMG suggest a small but steady rise in ridership through the 2015-17 period.
The writer’s review suggests we went from a very efficient and highly-used system, to a remarkably underused and horribly inefficient system in less than 10 years. I don’t know but I suspect there are data issues here clouding the true picture.
First, let us recall that Lethbridge used to operate the school bus system. The numbers for school bus and public City routes seem to have been considered separately from 2011 onward; is it possible they were combined for 2005? If you take out the school kids, that could produce quite a drop in recorded ridership.
Second, consider the peer transit system in the city of Kamloops (noted in the Stantec report). The Stantec chart makes Kamloops look like a model of ridership and efficiency numbers. As a former Kamloopsian, I have a hard time reconciling the comparative figures with my observations (though I will say I believe it a better-used system than in Lethbridge). However, they do make sense when you consider that the School Board in Kamloops operates a small bus fleet and provides subsidized City bus passes to students in lieu – in other words, the Kamloops numbers are inflated by School children riding the City busses, who are nonetheless counted in the general ridership.
I can agree that the primary focus of the City should be on improving ridership. The Transit Master Plan pretty much says that already, and proposes a number of changes that include some of the things the writer nonetheless targets (the new terminals and heated shelters are supposed to be part of the increased ridership plan). My concern is how Stantec estimates increases in ridership – they expect ridership to more than double in the medium-to-long term. What drives that estimate? It isn’t explained. If they are just looking at numbers from a peer community like Kamloops and thinking “if they can do it, so can we”, then I don’t believe they have done their homework on the peer systems. The quality of the policy choices we make now will be influenced by the quality of advice received – I sure hope the quality of that advice is higher than I fear it to be.