DRT buys new buses as part of cartel

This year, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation set up a process by which transit systems could participate in a joint bus purchase, thereby obtaining a better price than they could individually. This process has now been completed, with New Flyer being the winning bidder, and the overall price being an estimated $15000 per bus [...]

A trickle of buses

A little bird has told me that some of seven used Nova LFS buses purchased for DRT are now starting to enter service in Whitby and Oshawa.  This won’t make a huge immediate change, but it’s good to see nonetheless.  Of course, we’re still expecting the order of 30 new New Flyer D40LF buses to [...]

Apologies

My apologies for the lack of posts over the last while. My twins came home from the hospital last week, and my wife and I have been adjusting and learning about our new children. Updating the blog unfortunately was a lower priority than getting sleep.
But we’re adjusting and things are getting easier, so [...]

Gridlock in the GTA

Crossposted from Steve Munro’s web site:
The St. Lawrence Centre Forum is hosting a panel on this subject on Wednesday, February 28 from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. Admission is free on a first-come, first-served basis.
http://forum.stlc.com/forum.php
The panel will include:

Rob MacIsaac, Chair of the GTTA
Adam Giambrone, Chair of the TTC and member of City Council
Gary McNeil, Managing [...]

LRTs in Toronto

There is a very interesting discussion going on over at Steve Munro’s blog about Toronto’s upcoming purchase of 204 new streetcars. These will be new low-floor cars about twice the size of a standard streetcar, placing them squarely in the category of Light Rail Transit (LRT) equipment.  Tenders will go out later this year, with [...]

DRT Year 1 – Route signs, route numbering

On January 1, 2006, DRT inherited separate route systems from APTA (in Ajax and Pickering), Whitby Transit, Oshawa Transit, and Clarington Transit. Each of those systems quite naturally had numbered their routes independently starting with route “1″. On DRT’s day 1, therefore, there were four route “1″’s in service, corresponding to each [...]

DRT Year 1 – Web Site and Communications

The DRT Year 1 series continues with a look at DRT’s web site and general communications strategy. This is an area where it would be hard for DRT to do worse than their predecessor systems in Ajax/Pickering, Whitby, and Oshawa. Their web sites were part of the municipal web site, making them harder [...]

Durham Seeks Federal Funds

Durhamregion.com has a story covering Durham seeking $150 million transit investment split between the region, the federal government, and the provincial government.
This isn’t news at Durham Transit Review, since we’ve covered this in the past. The article points out the application is not complete yet but should be in by late February. [...]