Students often lobby teachers or professors in order to convince them to give them a better grade on their work. Guelph Transit managed to accomplish that with the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
A report card from the board of trade graded 11 municipal and regional transit systems in the Greater Toronto Area. The report released last Wednesday gave Guelph Transit a D+. But general manager of Guelph Transit Robin Gerus felt the board of trade omitted something important that would have given a much better score.
“If we would have had our on-time performance included, it would have greatly increased our final rating,” said Gerus on Friday.
Gerus got in touch with someone at the Toronto Region Board of Trade that day. He was able to make them aware of the on-time performance and reliability factor.
“We were able to confirm … their reliability score of 88 per cent, which is one of the highest in the region,” Jennifer Van Der Valk, the board of trade’s V-P of communications and public affairs, told CJOY and Global News on Friday.
“We’ve adjusted the report card… and it brings them up to a C+.”
Van Der Valk did note that there were other areas that Guelph Transit needed to improve on and that was why the grade wasn’t as high. The report ranked Guelph high in base service coverage but noted that overall ridership declined due to a reduction in ridership since 2010.
It also explained how increasing frequency of service and improving integration with GO Transit can improve their score.
Gerus said Guelph Transit is into its second year of their 10-year Future Ready Action Plan and is starting to make inroads into improving those areas.
“Some of the injects of that plan go hand-in-hand in line with upcoming interregional transit injects in the coming years as well as closing infrequencies and expanding our transit.”
This was the first time that the board of trade released their transit report card. It factors in things like base service coverage, frequent service coverage, reliability, transit priority measures, 24-hour service delivery, and integration in their final grade.
Waterloo Region got a B- while Milton’s grade was a D-. Toronto and Mississauga both received a B, which was the highest grade among the 11 transit systems.
“We set up a rubric of metrics that we consider the best in class metrics against which you would measure any transit system,” said Van Der Valk.
“So while some did better than the others, it wasn’t something that we score on something like a bell curve where we compared one against the other. The metrics were the same against each of them.”