By Maddie Savage
The new GOVA Transit marks the first change to Sudbury Transit in 20 years, however students are expressing concerns with this new system.
On August 26, Sudbury Transit was rebranded as GOVA, which included changes to bus routes and connections to Laurentian University.
Several students have been concerned with the new system since the express via Paris (route 4) has changed frequency from every fifteen minutes to every thirty minutes.
TJ Laplante, an Ecology student at Laurentian University uses the GOVA transit at least 3 times a week to get to campus. According to Laplante, the Laurentian University via Paris route has become “packed” and “unpredictable”.
“Due to the fact that they have slight odd hours, its become very unpredictable whether we’ll actually get to school on time or super early,” he said.
“I prefer the old bus system, but that’s because it really benefited me. I can’t speak to everyone, but personally the new bus system doesn’t really work well.”
“Unfortunately the change in the schedule has really thrown a lot of people off,” he said. “It’s gotten quite frustrating.”
Eric Greene, a student in Sports Administration uses the transit around 5 times a week. Greene said that he has noticed a difference with the new GOVA system.
“Before the GOVA thing happened, I would get on my bus and it would take me forty minutes to get to school and now it takes an hour and ten [minutes],” Greene said.
According to Greene the bus system would be better if the connecting buses were “more thought out.”
“The Laurentian bus goes by [about] ten minutes earlier so then I have to wait [about] a half hour at the bus station,” he said.
Aaron Enns, a student in Law and Justice said he uses the transit almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day. According to Enns, an issue he has noticed is the “crowding” on the busses.
“The buses [were usually] crowded even with the fifteen minute buses and now they’re almost always crowded,” Enns said. “There is a noticeable difference, you can tell.”
“In an ideal world we would have the bus going every fifteen minutes again, but I understand it could be unrealistic. So, I have no major issues with it,” he added.
Enns said he likes the new GOVA app compared to the old website which he said was “confusing to navigate.”
Michelle Ferrigan, the Director of Transit has been working alongside the community for the past two years in order to review the bus services.
“We made changes to the transit network based on the community’s priority,” Ferrigan said.
“What we heard the most was what was reflected because we can’t have it all in a transit system, otherwise we would have a taxi service.”
“We had four big public engagement processes throughout the two years. It was council, it was senior management, it was our team, and it was the public.”
According to Ferrigan, the change was due to the fact that they were aiming towards better Sunday service, better after ten service, and more connection to the South End, focusing on the Hospital.
“With all of the changes that were done with the restructuring of the network, trade-offs happen everywhere and when it comes to the students one of the changes was especially on [route four].”
We’ve heard loud and clear that this is an issue.
Michelle Ferrigan, Sudbury’s director of transit
“More investment was done in route number three which is a main line. So this is where we’re going to concentrate all of our efforts is on these three main lines, the one, two, three go,” she said.
“This is a brand-new system, there [are] going to be some changes, we don’t know exactly where they are as of today so I can’t give specifics on what’s going to happen to the number four, but I can tell you that we’ve heard very loud and clear that this is an issue.”
Ferrigan said that students can expect to see some changes as of December 7th and that there will be more changes made in the late winter.
Ferrigan also addressed the issue of buses being too packed.
“Buses were full to the point we had to leave people behind, and that’s not a good level of service. That was fixed at the beginning of the year. We’re now at a point where we don’t leave people behind, if we are leaving someone behind, I would encourage them to call us,” she said.
“At the beginning of the year when we did the restructure because everything was new and we didn’t know which route [people] were going to pick, we kept a bit of money aside and some operators and buses tucked away just to deploy.”
“It’s not going to be perfect the first time, but we’re working on that. We want to see if we can make these times connect a little bit better,” Ferrigan added. “So, definitely I can see why they’re saying this and it’s something that we’re monitoring and we’re actually going to be fixing.”
“I would encourage students to go look at the transit action plan strategy that was approved by council because it really shows a bright future in terms of transit with Laurentian.”