That's A (Bus) Wrap!

Transit inglorious 

Travelling about Hamilton in a massive advertisement on wheels

By Randy Kay

It was an inspired moment. It was late, there was no transit, I was walking home with a long way to go, tired and hungry. Then I saw the neon pizza parlour sign: In a master stroke of slacker verve, I went in and bargained to get myself delivered home with my pizza. 2 for 1.

That was a couple decades ago and I figure it's a short step from savant to sucker. Now I find myself sitting on an HSR bus that is, from the outside, a giant Gino's Pizza advertisement. The entire bus is wrapped, including the windows, which obscures my view as we ascend the escarpment.

Since when did advertising on buses begin to displace the rider's experience, and maybe take a slice or two of their dignity? In the pursuit of advertising revenue, has the transit system gone too far?

Inside the bus I can take the advertising signs above the windows. These interior ads are mostly "freebies" for city services — practise safe sex, that sort of thing explains Andy McLaughlin, senior manager of transit at the HSR.

Since when did advertising on buses begin to displace the rider’s experience? In the pursuit of advertising revenue, has the transit system gone too far?

Outside the bus, large exterior ads, the kind that often see the bus "wrapped" with vinyl graphics, are not even aimed at HSR customers, but instead at traffic beside and behind the bus.

The driver's side is the most sought after mobile billboard space to catch the SUV driver's eye, since it is uninterrupted by bus doors. In transit advertising parlance, this is the domain of the "King Card."

You can advertise in the space for "cards" or go for a wrap. The curb side goes by the tag "70 Card" for a 70-inch advertising space, the rear of the bus is ripe for a "tail wrap." Other mobile ad-lingo includes "Partial Mural," "Side Mural," "Full Wrap," "Super Tail," or the "Full Back."

Three sides of the bus can be wrapped in ads, and wraps are outpacing smaller advertising cards on the sides of buses, says McLaughlin. After all, why take 70 inches when you can take a full canvas for a triptych of advertising glory as buses trundle through town.

Only the front of the bus is free of sales rental space, to allow for considerations you'd expect, like driver's vision, and to give passengers at least a glimpse of fleet colours as they await the festooned flyer.

Ads are administered by a third party, Streetseen Media, which sells the ad space and provides an "annual minimum guaranteed payment" to the HSR of $440,000 a year, says McLaughlin. The HSR nets 60 per cent of revenue over and above that threshold.

The HSR receives occasional complaints from riders who don't like their view obstructed since people often use landmarks to determine bus stop locations.

Buses already have a bad rap (pun intended), even among some "higher order" transit advocates, so covering sleek paint jobs and a chance for some city/transit branding is being sacrificed to sell other people's products. Even pizza.

McLaughlin has an administrator's eye on the money, as he should. Any move to limit advertising would mean a hit on the revenue that the HSR has come to depend on. But if City Hall would use revenue from federal gas taxes meant to lower greenhouse gas emissions on transit, rather than roads, we could get some pizzazz rather than pizza ads.

There are some spectacular rides on many routes. Any route up or down the Mountain will give panoramic views of the lower city, splendidly splayed out with the blue centre of the bay reminding us that the city is built around (and on top of) water.

One of my favourite bus routes for diverse city views is the #4 bus. Hop on downtown and trip through high energy Jamesville, past Pier 4, along Burlington Street through Steel Mills, past the Hells Angels Club House on Gage (is that a tourist attraction?) over to Woodward and end gloriously atop Mount Albion.

The HSR could even invest in smart technology to enhance the untapped educational and tourism potential of fixed route buses. Bring some of the history ("Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie played here for striking Steelworkers in '46"), and current events (to your left you see the new GO Station being built) in a way that adds value to the experience of riding the bus.

As it is now, riders are an afterthought to poorly considered advertising.

http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/4628332-transit-inglorious/

Photo by Randy Kay (did not appear with article)

How far will you go to improve the city, yourself?

A rash of pedestrian fatalities should heighten the need for re balancing our transportation infrastructure - the physical space required for safe and enjoyable walking routes, for example – but without a forceful response from city hall, the fatalities instead reinforce a negative notion that walking is somehow not a safe option unless isolated on a treadmill.

It does seem that in today's adult world walking has become a specialized act more associated with pure exercise than an option for getting places. A glance at the local school reveals empty bike racks (if there are racks at all), and a generation who rarely walk or cycle to classes when a parent can drive them. Whatever the supposed advantages of a drive-through culture, healthy lifestyles is not one of them.

For successive generations utilitarian walking is fading from consciousness. Between 1969 and 2001 the percentage of students who would walk or cycle to school has dropped almost by 2/3 .

The move from active modes (cycling and walking) to driving have their impact. In her research “KidsWalk: Then and Now,” Christina Kober reports on some alarming trends: in a short 15 year span (1980 to 1995) childhood asthma rates risen from 45.1 per 1,000 to 82 per 1,000, while childhood obesity rates have quadrupled since 1963.

And for parents who drive their kids to school for “safety” reasons, take note: Kober's research reveals that half the kids hit by near schools are by cars driven by parents of students.

School Boards are not helping, the research suggests, as small neighbourhood schools are replaced by larger but more remote schools, increasing children's travel distance. This sort of decision is only thinkable in an automobile-saturated culture.

As the late cultural critic Ivan Illich noted “vehicles had created more distances than they helped to bridge; more time was used by the entire society for the sake of traffic than was 'saved'.”

A road diet for the city to cut the traffic

A man from Hamilton's traffic department is poised at a flip chart, marker in hand. He's frozen, not moving.

David Cohen, a member of the audience at the public meeting, is waiting for his comment to be added to the list on the chart paper.

The man at the chart refuses to move, his Sharpie wilfully restrained from touching the page. He will not, indeed appears incapable of, writing the words on paper.

The words he won't write?

"Hamilton needs more traffic congestion."

Recalling this event, Cohen infuses it with meaning, a metaphor for institutional resistance, resistance frozen in time.

"Since the 1950s, we've created conditions for automobile travel at the expense of other ways of getting around. Congestion was the issue then and is still the issue; so, are we going to do something to make it more convenient to use cars?" he asks rhetorically.

"If history has any meaning, we will only crowd up those streets and expressways with more cars."

In other words, catering to cars hasn't paid off, unless you consider the payoffs to be air pollution, traffic-related deaths and injury (more than 800 fatalities a year in Ontario) and frequently clogged major highways due to "accidents" and traffic volume. Most wouldn't.

To shift the emphasis to other modes of transportation, Cohen advocates creating conditions "more conducive to transit and less conducive to cars."

The way to escape congestion is, counter-intuitively, to take space from automobile traffic and give it to other uses: transit lanes, roadside parking, wider sidewalks, bicycle lanes. Call it a road diet.

Hamilton has a disproportionately high amount of arterial roads and expressways compared to other Ontario cities. We weigh in at second highest with 7.1 "lane metres" per capita. Toronto has 3. So a diet seems in order.

Taking a Robin Hood approach to existing roads, i.e. stealing lanes from cars to give to other modes, would serve to calm traffic (making things slower, thereby safer) while creating the kind of infrastructure needed for intrepid cyclists and transit users to get ahead.

Service is key to boosting bus ridership

For people who have grown up in a culture that highly values cars, the bus remains something of a mystery.

Like someone encountering a strange and confusing religion, the bus novice finds there are many secrets to be revealed. When does the bus come? Where does it go? How do I get on? How do I get off?

The fare box on one bus happily consumed my friend's $10 bill before anyone could stop her. We all looked down, embarrassed to inform her that the driver cannot make change.

Fortunately the transit learning curve is short. Armed with schedules and tickets and with key bus-check numbers memorized, passengers can navigate the city with confidence. This is fortunate since transit is going to figure more prominently in the urban and inter-urban streetscapes of the near future.

Hamilton's transit director recently revealed what most crowded bus riders already know, that "valid service demands far outstrip our available funding and our available capacity."

Targets for Hamilton's transit ridership predict that the transit's share of the daily trips made on all forms of transportation will double to 12 per cent by 2030.

While no one is going to force cars off North American roads, the way we use vehicles is likely going to change.

Even if you're not up on the current discussion on peak oil or the latest climate change disaster, it's perhaps time for us all to rethink our over-reliance on cars. Influential voices such as author Howard Kunstler warn that we need to "start thinking beyond the car." He's not talking futuristic helicopters or personalized jetpacks. "Need something to do?" he asks his readers, "Get involved in restoring public transit."

That Hamilton could be doing more is a given: the Transportation Master Plan shows expenditures on transit have been in decline for years, with a corresponding decline in local transit's modal share: between 1986 and 2001, the share of trips handled by transit went from 12 per cent to 7 per cent. In the same time frame drivers increased their modal share from 63 per cent to 64 per cent.

Hamilton is locked in a car-culture embrace that can only be described as unhealthy. Compared to 10 years ago, the average Hamilton resident uses 15 per cent more fuel for transportation.

Hamilton fares badly compared to 10 other Canadian cities in terms of per capita transit use (fourth lowest) and per capita annual fuel use (second highest). We also have the second highest amount of arterial and expressway lane metres, second only to Oshawa.