In the 2016 census it was revealed that the City of Surrey (one of the many municipalities within Metro Vancouver) has a population count of 517,885 individuals (Statistics Canada, 2016). It is projected that by the end of 2046, this population count will reach 779, 885 individuals (City of Surrey, 2018). Given this anticipated surge in the population and given that a large amount of the population already uses public transit to commute to work (15%), it is expected that this demand for public transit will only increase (Statistics Canada, 2016; City of Surrey, 2016). Of the population total, 27% of people are of the ages between 15-34 which encompasses the ages of a lot of university students (Statistics Canada 2016; Statistics Canada 2010). Thus, while there are no statistics detailing the transportation choices of university students from Surrey, from my personal experience I can say that public transit is and will continue to be an important method of transportation for a lot of student commuters from Surrey to the many post-secondary institutions across Metro Vancouver.
Currently in Surrey, there are four Expo line SkyTrain stations as well as multiple bus exchanges (i.e. Gateway Station, Newton Exchange, Scott Road Station etc.). As a full-time resident of Surrey, I can personally attest to how beneficial the transit system is in Surrey. It allows me to easily get to my job in Surrey, as well as travel down to Vancouver for another one of my jobs and travel across the different municipalities of Metro Vancouver to see friends. However, when it came to travel to UBC, when I used to commute on a daily basis, I was often faced with a lot of difficulty. My commute involved taking multiple buses (up to 3) alongside the SkyTrain especially at non-peak time times. The wait times themselves were also a huge source of suffering for me as I was typically required to wait 20-40 minutes as buses wouldn’t show up or would show up extremely late. Therefore, when it came out in the news in 2018 that there would be an express shuttle running from Surrey to UBC, I was ecstatic, even though I had moved onto campus at UBC. To me, this was such an important service given how much myself and other Surrey to UBC commuters faced just to get to school on a daily basis.
Just this past summer however, it was revealed in the news that this shuttle service had shut down. According to the news release, the failure of this service lied in low levels of ridership as well as fare levels too expensive for riders (Chan, 2019). The shutdown of this shuttle imbued within me this interest of the nuances of public transit. Particularly I became fascinated with what makes a bus route or bus service ideal and how I could generate a route that could be much more successful. Thus, for my GEOB 370 project, I decided that I would fulfill this interest of mine and use GIS to produce a least-cost path from Surrey to UBC.
Due to the nature of my project, I didn’t have any hypotheses or predictions for my analysis. Instead I developed a set of objectives which are mentioned below, that I intended to complete:
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- To conduct research on the shutdown of the Surrey to UBC private shuttle service as well as on what makes a bus route ideal to better understand what kind of criteria my least-cost bus route should incorporate in order to be successful.
- To determine the location of the bus terminal (starting point) for my bus route using an MCE analysis.
- To create a least-cost path from Surrey to UBC by applying costs to different land uses.
These objectives essentially governed the entirety of this project and my ultimate goal to determine the ideal bus route from Surrey to UBC that aligns with the public’s transport needs.