More than two-million rides a year are missing from city hall's pitch for Bus Rapid Transit funding.
And new documents suggest the mayor's strategy to break London's Shift BRT plan into smaller pieces caused ridership projections to plummet.
When council selected three of the five segments to advance for senior government funding, they did so before detailed business cases were completed.
Now that they're done, pro-BRT group ‘Build this City’ says they make for a weaker pitch.
Marcus Plowright says, “The business case going forward that we are submitting to the province is dramatically less powerful and may be less successful in attracting provincial and federal funds.”
The concern centres on future ridership growth.
In the original business case for all five segments, the plan was expected to bring 2.87 million additional rides by 2035 – a 10 per cent increase.
But in the pitch for three individual routes, that estimate says BRT will boost annual ridership by one per cent on the east route, 1.6 per cent on the south route and well below one per cent on the downtown loop in 2035.
That's about 2.1 million fewer rides than in the original Shift BRT business case.
Mayor Ed Holder’s decision to divide BRT resulted in political consensus, but also changed how engineers calculated future ridership.
Shift BRT staff say a full system is more attractive to riders and the divided system lacks combined ridership.
In addition, the north corridor, which was not moved forward, has the most ridership, so that represents a significant amount of the difference in projections.
Plowright believes council should reconsider and submit the entire BRT system.
“We should look at presenting an entire system-wide network of transportation improvements with a dramatically better business case as one of the options for them to fund.”
Holder was not available for comment Thursday.
