Halifax Transit’s corridor routes in their own words “form the spine of the transit network”. However, riders might say otherwise about how reliable and frequent these key routes actually are.

On page 37 of the Moving Forward Together Plan, corridor routes are described as the following:

“The purpose of Corridor Routes is to provide consistent, frequent, service on high demand corridors, connecting residential areas or retail districts with regional destinations like shopping, employment, schools, and services.
What differentiates Corridor Routes from other route types is the sustained demand for transit over the course of the day, late into the evenings, and on weekends. These routes are well positioned to support increased residential density along the corridors which will, in turn, will support increases in potential ridership generated by adjacent land uses.”

On paper, everything sounds great –frequent and reliable service that covers all operational hours of the weekdays and weekends. But how frequent actually are these routes?

Frequency:

In our Essential Elements of Good Transit page, good frequent service is when your bus arrives every 15 minutes or better –especially for core routes. However for weekdays, only 7/10 routes hit consistent 15-minute frequency throughout most of the day (routes 1, 2, 4, 5, 6*, 7, and 9*).

*Routes 6 and 9 sometimes have gaps of around 20 minutes between buses mid-day due to inconsistent scheduling between route branches.

Corridor route 8 never even hits 15-minute frequency, falling as short as every 30 minutes after 3:00pm for the rest of the service day in off-peak direction.

Weekend service gets much worse… Only routes 1 and 2 actually maintain 15-minute frequency, while most other corridors drop to every 30 minutes (with the exception of routes 5 and 7 which maintain every 20 minutes on just Saturday). Your first thought might be something along the lines of “weekend ridership isn’t as high as weekdays, and therefore doesn’t need the service”, however according to Halifax Transit’s latest Quarterly Report, Saturday/Sunday ridership has been on a incline, ABOVE where weekend ridership was pre-COVID-19.

Chart pulled from Halifax Transit’s 2022/23 Q2 Quarterly Report

Reliability:

Again, looking at Halifax Transit’s recent Quarterly Report, we can see statistics on how well each route performs in terms of reliability. Halifax Transit’s on-time target is 85% reliability (though aiming for even better never hurts!) Among the 10 corridor routes, only 2 corridor routes saw weekday on-time reliability above 85% (routes 6 and 7). Routes 1, 2 and 9 have around 70% on-time reliability or less (overall a downwards trend from previous quarterly reports).

Chart pulled from Halifax Transit’s 2022/23 Q2 Quarterly Report

So What?

Many corridor routes –the 10 most important routes in the system, fail in either frequency, reliability, or both. The foundation of Halifax Transit’s network simply isn’t enough, and it’s leaving riders frustrated at lack of service, missed connections and more. We need to speak up about these failures, demanding better service on these key 10 routes, and push for the implementation of proper transit priority measures to make them work. Once we have a successful foundation, we can take a deeper look at how to expand reliable service to more areas (looking at key areas in parts of Bedford and Dartmouth which aren’t even covered by corridor routes), and continue to make transit in HRM even better.

Do these points resonate with your transit experience? Send your concerns and complaints to us, and we’ll be compiling where council should improve transit the most.