A Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus for Locals!
It’s tourist season in Victoria, and the lower Government Street is packed with with visitors from all over the world. At this time of year you also can’t avoid seeing the double-decker hop-on-hop-off buses that circle around the city. When I think back to many of the travel destinations that I have visited in the last few years, the hop-on-hop-off (HOHO) bus is a pretty common mode of transportation for tourists. I used one just last year when I was in Varadero, Cuba. When you go online and look there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of HOHO buses all over the world. They might be one of the most common types of tourist transportations you can find. When you realise just how popular they are, you have to ask yourself why. I think that there are really three main reasons: They are easy to understand, they are easy to find, and they provide a unique value.
By easy to understand I mean, HOHO buses operate usually on a loop and have defined schedule. You don’t need to learn the whole city transit system, you don’t need to know multiple routes to make connections to the places you want to go. You just need to find the starting point and get on the bus and then get off at the places you want to visit. When you are done at that sight, you get back on when the next one comes along until you are back where you started. And you aren’t going to be confused as to which bus to get on when you get to the starting point or while you are waiting at a stop because they are very clearly branded and generally are double decker buses with no roof. They also allow you to see many of the sights in a city and sometimes even pair discounts for those sights in one simple cost (Though I will say, at least for Victoria, that cost isn’t cheap).
The simplicity of the HOHO operations you see around the world make me wonder why we don’t try and replicate them for locals. By that I don’t mean a bus that takes us around to the tourist sights, but a bus that is easy to understand, easy to find and provide value to citizens. I have written about this concept before with my article on circulator buses. The idea also isn’t completely foreign to Victoria, we have actually had two attempts in the region, one in Langford and one right downtown in the city.
Langford had the Langford Trolley, a free service that operated on a couple of loops around the municipality for a decade. It had an annual ridership of about 40k people which is pretty small but definitely demonstrates that there was a need for the service. Unfortunately due to rising costs the service was shut down in 2017. Victoria also dabbled in the free trolley service. The short downtown loop also used a similar faux-vintage trolley like Langford did. Unfortunately, you can’t really search Times Colonist articles from the aughts yet. That said, I found the article about it in a pay service that indicated that the trial started in 2009. From my recollection, it only ran for about six months. Both of these services were never going to have high ridership. The routes were not optimal; the buses they used were awkward; and they could not service people with mobility challenges. Sadly, when something is attempted poorly and then performs poorly, it is used as a demonstration that the idea is not good. I don’t think that this is true of this type of service if implemented well. If we looked at the HOHO model and had a number of smaller, accessible buses that were all painted in the same way and that ran on a frequent time table around downtown and only stopped at a small number of well marked stops, I think Victorians would jump at the opportunity.
A HOHO service like this gives you a choice to move around the city more than you would have by foot and that means that you would have more options to visit stores, go to appointments, or take in a cultural event than you would have otherwise. As more people begin to move around the city and spend more time downtown, it would create vibrancy. Furthermore, since 2009 downtown Victoria has changed significantly. There are far more people living downtown and many of them would love the option of being able to walk out the door of their apartment building and hop on a bus that would take them maybe even just four or five blocks down the road. The key would be to have a good selection of stops at significant distance to each other on a loop. I could easily see a loop starting at Royal Jubilee and then having just two stops before arriving at City Hall, perhaps Oak Bay Junction and Central Junior. The benefit of this type of service is that it is fast as there is less time spent on and off boarding passengers.
I think that now is a good time to think of new services like this. We have definitely seen signaling from the new council that they want to encourage developers to build less parking, which is a great idea, but it only works for people if they have transportation options that can make car travel irrelevant and given our current lacklustre transit service in the city, I can’t really blame people that are not willing to live a car-free or car-lite lifestyle. I would encourage you to read the article I wrote in 2019 about circulator buses, or at least go in and look at the routes I proposed (well the north/south one wouldn’t work anymore exactly). I would love to hear if you think that a HOHO bus for locals would be something you would like to see. Let me know in the comments.