Business View Magazine - Dec 2023

and on-demand services. The Oakville Transit network provides service within the town of Oakville, as well as making connections to neighboring municipalities – the city of Burlington and the city of Mississauga. Since it is located about a half-hour drive from Toronto, it is also a preferred means of transportation to and from that bigger city. It provides direct connections to the regional rail network, also known as GO Transit, and services the six GO Transit stations, which have a mixture of rail and bus operations. RECOVERING FROM THE PANDEMIC When COVID hit, the system was severely impacted as lockdowns and travel restrictions caused a major reduction in ridership. But according to Director of Transit, Adrian Kawun, those pre-pandemic levels are close to returning. “On some days, we’re seeing more ridership than we did in 2019,” he says. “That also is an effect of some of the programs that we put into place for residents to come back to transit and how we promoted the use of public transit over the personal car to get to destinations around and throughout the town.” One of those promotional programs, instituted this past spring, included extending free transit to young people and seniors in the town. “We were trying to get our youth onto the system; to get them to know how to use the system and have that usage continue through their adult lives,” Kawun reports. “Once we implemented free transit, the explosion of ridership was amazing -- and from not only youth and seniors. We had to put more service onto the street just to accommodate the additional rides.” COMMUNICATION WITH RIDERS IS KEY Kawun has been in his present position for the past two years, having logged over 16 years in the transit industry as a vehicle cleaner, revenue collector, transit scheduler, service planner, and planning manager. He believes that a lot of people don’t use public transportation because they don’t understand how well it can work for them. “And to get people on, you have to teach them,” he says.“You have to provide those communications in terms of how, what, when, and where.” To achieve that necessary level of communication, Oakville Transit relies on a full suite of technological platforms, starting with its Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). “Our ITS system helps us identify where all the buses are in the system, and helps us to dispatch and locate the vehicles throughout the entire network,” Kawun explains. “The ITS system that we have on the street also is fed into our scheduling information, so we know, 309 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 12 OAKVI LLE TRANSI T