New bus boss after commuters who have a choice

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He’s got a reputation for steady-handed leadership, but Geoff Marinoff knows he’ll have to shake things up in his new role as director of Mississauga Transit.
An engineer with an appreciation for no-nonsense efficiency born of his Canadian Forces years, Marinoff was hired from the TTC to grab the wheel of Mississauga’s bus system at a time of unprecedented challenge.
Long considered synonymous with sprawl, the city has an urgent need to coax residents out of their cars and onto a bus. It will be the soft-spoken Marinoff’s job to take that bus service where it’s never gone before.
“Where people work, live and play doesn’t respect lines on a map,” he says of the challenge to provide reliable transit links through the city’s labyrinth of subdivisions and industrial sites built to distance homes from high-traffic arteries.
Mississauga Transit’s goal is to increase its 29 million annual bus rides by 25 per cent in the next five years. To do that, it will add 75 buses to its fleet of about 390 and increase service hours from 1.1 million per year to 1.4 million.
The bus garage near Burnhamthorpe and Mavis Rds. is being expanded and the city has taken the lead in testing a regional fare card to make it more convenient for riders to transfer to other transit systems.
There’s a new bus corridor on the books and talk of light rail for the Hurontario and Dundas corridors.
Mississauga Transit has two kinds of customers - captive riders who don’t have access to a car, and those with a choice. Even drivers who won’t take the bus in off-hours can be persuaded to use it to commute to work, if the speed and convenience are competitive.
“What we’re really talking about is getting the ‘choice rider’ to leave the car in the driveway,” says Marinoff, 46, who spent more than seven years at the TTC, most recently as deputy general manager of subway operations.
A long-time resident of Mississauga’s Applewood area, Marinoff points to his own commute as a classic example. Four days a week, he drives. It takes about eight minutes. Once a week he rides the bus, which also takes about eight minutes to get him to the city centre. There, however, he has to wait 16 minutes to catch a connecting bus to the transit offices, near Burnhamthorpe Rd. west of Mavis.
Trim that 16-minute wait by 10 minutes and you’ve got a far better commute option.
“To get that choice rider, we really have to compete on speed. To do that, you need to provide a good service, with good frequencies, with competitive travel times in competition with the car - a pretty daunting task,” he says. “That’s why you have to do things differently than in the past.”
What Mississauga Transit needs is the backbone that the TTC gives riders with the subway - a spine of frequent, reliable service through a key corridor.
Bus rapid transit with signal priority can help in the short term, and maybe light rail in the longer term, Marinoff says.
“Light rail can provide a level of comfort a city bus doesn’t necessarily provide,” he says. “If it’s fast, reliable and free of the road network, it’s very competitive over time.”

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