Took a ride on it tonight with my friend and for the most part it was quite pleasant.
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It felt like there was a quite notable speed increase, even at night. For the most part we were just flowing through and not stopping all that much; not counting the jean talon part ofc.
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The signage is quite clear and clean. The screens displaying the upcoming buses and their respective terminuses is quite useful, and the frontmost door being marked as the place for wheelchair embarking is a nice touch.
Overall I think that once the jean talon bit is settled it’ll a fairly good little project for what it’s worth. That said there are a few things that struck me as odd:
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The furnishing of the shelters is kinda minimal… There are no bins for garbage, benches are completely forgone in favour of these weird bar things ur supposed to lean on, and it seems like it’s gonna get super cold in the winter (I didn’t notice any heaters installed but it could be that I missed em).
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The stops are located after the traffic light. There’s probably a very good reason for this that i’m ignoring, but initial impressions seem like this is weirdly inefficient (by up to a minute per stop) because we’d have to stop for the traffic light, wait for it to turn green (well, straight ig), cross the intersection then stop again to pick up/drop off people. I kinda feel like it’d have been more efficient to have the stops behind the light so that when we get stuck behind a red we can do the regular bus stop things at the same time. It probably only adds up to about 5 or so minutes of wasted time but still lowkey bugs me xD
- On that, there were in total about a dozen people (spead out over the length of the line) who clearly got confused by this and were waiting on the tiny curb behind the traffic light thinking that’s where they were supposed to be. It was kinda hilarious to then see the driver point to the actual SRB stop and then for them to do a mad dash down the middle of the intersection to get to the SRB stop before the bus does, red lights be damned XD
So yeah it was overall fairly good. Would i say it was worth the 10 years of wait… eh, I mean honestly i wish it was better than this but FWIW I think the wait kinda just set unrealistic expectations and what we got is more in line with what is reasonable. The (lack of) furnishing of the stations is easily the thing that annoys me most, and the placement of the stations after instead of before the light kinda puzzles me but id bet that im just ignoring something; please lmk if you know what it is.
