Twelve more buses for the 501: Züm adds capacity as Queen Street crowding tops the complaint file
Transit's busiest corridor gets its biggest single service boost in years. Riders say it's about eighteen months late.
Twelve additional buses are coming to the Züm 501 Queen corridor this fall, the largest single service increase on one route in the system's history. Peak frequency drops to a bus roughly every four minutes — which regulars will recognize as the frequency the corridor needed some time ago.
The 501 is the workhorse of a workhorse system. Brampton Transit has posted some of the fastest ridership growth in the country for most of a decade, and Queen Street carries the heaviest share of it: the corridor moves more people per day than some GO rail lines, in buses that riders photograph at crush load and post with captions the Bulletin cannot reprint.
The twelve buses are the easy half of the fix. The hard half is the street itself — Queen's bus lanes exist in segments, and every gap returns the 501 to mixed traffic exactly where traffic is worst. The corridor study that would extend the lanes end-to-end is finished; what it needs is a construction budget, and that file now sits in the same capital plan the development-charge freeze just squeezed.
Service changes take effect with the fall board. The Bulletin's transit desk will be riding the corridor the first week — front seat, stopwatch, before-and-after — and will print what the four-minute promise looks like at eight in the morning.
