Impacts of a New Express Bus Service in Waterloo Region

The Urban Transportation Showcase Program (UTSP) is a Federal Government program with the goal of quantifying, through field deployments (showcases), the impacts that various transportation initiatives have on green house gas (GHG) emissions. The Regional Municipality of Waterloo proposed the implementation of an express bus service supported by various bus control and traveller information technologies (e.g. transit signal priority, web-based trip planner, automatic passenger counting system), community based marketing initiatives, and inter-modal integration measures. The express bus service (iXpress) commenced service at the beginning of September 2005. The supporting bus control and traveller information technologies have been deployed incrementally. Despite delays in technology implementation the iXpress has been successful in attracting riders with most recently available data showing that ridership is at 92% of forecasted levels and growing. The analysis presented here demonstrates that iXpress is currently responsible for the reduction of approximately 1.5 million kilometres of personal automobile trips per year, with an associated reduction of approximately 500 tonnes of GHG emissions.