Milton blog

Bus service, parking lots stretched

As fast as GO Transit expands its bus and train service, ridership on many routes appears to be growing faster.

This year GO was expecting about a 4- to 5 per cent increase in riders. But March ridership numbers released to GO’s board of directors this week showed average weekday ridership increased 7.5 per cent over the same month last year.

That’s about 14,080 more riders daily or the equivalent of nine additional train trips.

A surfeit of riders is a good problem to have when “most transit companies are out there screaming to get people on the system,” said GO managing director Gary McNeil.

“We’re trying to manage the demand based on the supply we’ve got available,” he said, adding that bus capacity is almost “maxed out” even though GO introduced the first of its new double-decker fleet on the Highway 407 routes in April and it is not retiring its coaches as fast as it had expected.

Ridership is migrating to the off-peak periods when there are seats available on the trains, but at many stations there’s virtually no parking available by the end of the morning rush, said customer service director Bill Jenkins.

The third track being built along GO’s busy Lakeshore line means the Oakville VIA station for about $3 million by December.(The new station will be built northwest of the existing building, which is being demolished.

Georgetown riders will have their weekend bus service to Union Station increased. An hourly express service will service downtown Brampton and a second hourly service will go to Bramalea and Malton.

The transit company also plans to launch a new weekday bus service between Bronte and Milton with 13 trips in each direction to connect with 407 bus service at the Burlington 407 Carpool lot, the Lakeshore West service to Union Station and McMaster University.

As it prepares to extend service into the Niagara Region, GO is also introducing buses from a new interim park n’ ride lot in Stoney Creek to the Burlington station. The move is expected to reduce the demand on parking at Burlington, where a new parking structure is supposed to open next month.

All GO Transit’s Milton trains are now pulling 12 cars that accommodate 300 additional passengers on each train.

The 12-car trains also are being used on three Lakeshore runs: the 8:25 a.m. Oshawa express train to Union Station; the 5:03 train to Pickering from Union and the 4:10 p.m. express to Burlington from Union Station.

Eight of GO’s 27 new locomotives are now in service. The agency is awaiting delivery of more locomotives before it can add more 12-car trains to the busy Lakeshore line. The new engines are supposed to be delivered by the middle of next year.

Meantime, some Lakeshore platforms still need to be lengthened to accommodate the longer trains. Platform work begins this month in Hamilton, in the summer at Appleby and in the fall at Long Branch.

– by Tess Kalinowski, Transportation Reporter for the Toronto Star

With the U.S. economy tanking, things are looking up for Balsillie’s dream of owning NHL team

Like a bad penny, he just keeps turning up.

At least that’s the way Gary Bettman must see it, though for most Canadians, billionaire businessman Jim Balsillie remains a bit of a hero, despite the best attempts by the NHL brass to paint him as some kind of reckless kook.

His real-world success would suggest rather strongly that he’s not that, and his great side project - to bring NHL hockey to people who actually like it - seems a whole lot more cool and rational than the league’s own expansion strategy over the past 40-odd years.

But trapped between the Toronto Maple Leafs’ territorial veto, as enshrined in the NHL constitution, and the knowledge that said veto might well be illegal, opening the league up to a nasty anti-trust suit, Bettman has precious little choice but to try to counter each Balsillie move with a countermove as the Research in Motion co-founder attempts to buy a franchise and move it to Hamilton.

Bettman leaped into the breach in Pittsburgh to keep Balsillie from purchasing the Penguins, then executed what may well have been the greatest masterstroke of his commissionership, persuading Nashville Predators owner Craig Leipold to take a $40-million (U.S.) haircut on the sale of his team and then arranging a nice soft landing for him as the new proprietor of the Minnesota Wild.

Give Bettman full style points for that one. But Balsillie wasn’t about to quit, and now larger forces are working in his favour.

That would be the American economy, arguably already in recession, and the fact that not a few NHL owners are finding it a bit of a tight squeeze right now because of the growing credit crisis.

The lockout may have helped create a system that’s been a boon to some franchises (mostly the rich, high-revenue ones, which certainly wasn’t the stated intent).

But for those teams carrying large debts, looking at empty seats and minuscule local broadcast revenue and having trouble spending up to a salary cap driven higher by the strong Canadian dollar, there’s not a whole lot of light at the end of the tunnel.

When Balsillie started poking around looking for a team that he could buy and move into the Copps Coliseum, there were three or four obvious targets, including the Pens, who had fallen into bankruptcy and were struggling to secure a new arena deal, and the Preds, whose owner had already triggered the exit clause in his lease, having given up on making NHL hockey work in that market.

Because Balsillie was more than willing to overpay, it took every bit of Bettman’s guile to keep those deals from closing. Both were killed before ever coming before the league’s board of governors for approval.

But what if the number of teams now quietly on the block has multiplied to six or eight or 10?

What if there is a whole bunch of owners who need to cash out, right now? That’s a whole lot of fires to put out all at once.

And if Balsillie does find another willing vendor, and manages to conclude a sale before Bettman can find a way to kill it, the barriers to his grand plan become a whole lot less certain.

In theory, the board could reject him as a potential owner, though the grounds for doing that in the league’s bylaws are only two: lack of financial wherewithal and lack of “character.”

By any measure of NHL precedent, Balsillie would pass both tests with flying colours - and so if a sale was blocked by the board, the aggrieved seller might well be moved to sue his fellow owners for de facto breach of contract.

If Balsillie did get a team, there would seem to be no legal way for the league to block him moving it (see the Al Davis v. NFL decision), provided he was free of a lease and met the criteria for relocation, which have to do with whether the new market is suitable for NHL hockey.

(Remember how quickly Hamilton resident jumped at the chance to put down deposits for season tickets when it looked as if the Predators might be coming to town?)

Which brings matters back to the territorial veto and to the league’s precarious legal position.

Obviously, Bettman is going to do everything in his power to prevent being stuck between a wealthy franchise determined to protect what it believes is its right and a wealthy potential owner more than happy to put up a fight.

In the commissioner’s dreams, after the last round, after the failure and the character assassination,

Balsillie would have slunk back to Waterloo, Ont., and found another hobby.

If it wasn’t clear then, it’s clear now:

He’s not that kind of guy.

– by Stephen Brunt of the Globe & Mail