Woodstock City Council Approves Transit Schedule Change

Friday, 13 January 2023 07:15

By Brad Kraemer

The buses in Woodstock will switch to a 40-minute schedule between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. starting on Monday March 6th.

WOODSTOCK - City Council has approved a revision to the transit schedule during the busiest hours of the day.

Starting March 6, Woodstock city buses will now be on a 40-minute cycle between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. as opposed to the usual 30-minute cycle. This means the buses will complete their routes three times in two hours instead of four times.

City Engineer Harold de Haan explains why this change was necessary.

"We've been tracking our performance, the reliability of our transit routes, and we've been finding that for the last six months or so, between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., due to volume of traffic and ridership, we've been running behind about 25 percent of the time, so we're only on schedule about 75 percent of the time. Since one of our goals is to stay on schedule 95 percent of the time, we thought this needed to be addressed because for a public transit system to be useful, it needs to be reliable."

Despite the less-than-ideal success rate, the motion to make this change was not unanimous. Councillor Kate Leatherbarrow believes that 75% is not the end of the world. She voiced concerns about the route being completed less times and ultimately was the only Councillor who opposed.

The next step is for the heavy advertisement of the new schedule from city staff, hence the long wait of a March 6 implementation date.

Mayor Jerry Acchione was thrilled to announce that ridership for Woodstock Transit is nearly up to pre-pandemic levels, which is not the case for many public transit systems. In December 2022, there were over 41,000 individual trips on the City’s conventional transit service, nearly double January 2022’s trip count. He added that it's important that drivers give buses space and be careful around them.