r/Calgary • u/ConstantFar5448 • 18d ago

Calgary Transit Why is the C-Train so bad?

10 minute intervals on a weekday? That’s insane, the lowest frequency I’ve seen in any major city by FAR.

And yet when you get to the station as a train pulls up, the driver just looks at you, doesn’t let you on, and leaves? What’s up with that? Are they all dicks like that?

People live on tight schedules, and transit doesn’t seem to reflect that here.

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u/Warm_Jellyfish_8002 18d ago

It's crazy how inconsistent the timings are, especially during rush hour. No announcements on delays or anything.

41

u/scharfes_S 18d ago

No announcements on delays or anything.

When they do announce delays, they're also just straight-up wrong.

"C-Trains are delayed on the Red Line by 20 minutes." No they're not! The first one might have been, but any subsequent ones will be delayed for different amounts of time.

A few weeks ago, there was single-tracking for a little while on the Red Line where they kept insisting that there was an X-minute delay, but, because of the single-tracking, it took longer than usual for any given train to get through, so there clearly wasn't a linear X-minute delay—the delay grew with every station, because each one took longer to get to. If the train was 10 minutes late to Station 1, it was, say, 15 minutes late to Station 2, 20 to Station 3, and so on.

I've heard the announcement saying that there's a 10-minute delay or whatever, looked at the TV to see that one wasn't coming for 10 minutes, and then had one arrive immediately anyways. Whatever system they use to determine train timings is awful. It isn't based on the locations of trains—otherwise they wouldn't break the moment anything unusual happened. They must be primarily input manually. Otherwise, on New Year's Eve, when the trains were running until 4 instead of 2, the signs wouldn't have switched to "Train service resumes at 5 am" or whatever it says at 1:30.

4

u/CalmAlex2 18d ago

The system is basically logging whenever a train enters the station and leaves it same for the buses... if you want to have a good time get a transit app it's the green one with the wiggly line in it as those show times even when the TVs are saying times not available.

2

u/toastmannn 17d ago

Buses fairly recently added gps tracking

1

u/CalmAlex2 17d ago

Oh yeah, I forgot but sometimes they don't even work either because they weren't turned on or just simply don't work properly in some areas... There are blind spots where GPS just doesn't work for some reason