• Transit should be a big part of the urban design.  Drive along Derry, houses facing Derry should’ve been medium density, 3-4 storey condos and townhomes.  More people next to major arterial roads –> more transit customers.  That’s a missed opportunity, but lets fix it for future surveys.
• Will it help if people with monthly passes had an option to use a taxi in case of emergencies (eg. Go train came in late and the last Milton bus left). Basically if the transit could guarantee that you’d never be stranded, perhaps more people would be open to it?
• Go to large employers, offer them a discount and give their employees monthly passes.  Promise them good bus service.  Wait, isn’t town of Milton itself a “big employer” in town :)? Hint, hint! 
• Investigate vanpool (I used to commute from the Snohomish County to the King County in WA. King County has 1,031 vanpool vans that provided 2.7 million rides at a cost of $0 to the municipality.  Snohomish County’s website explains the program.
• Consider charging for parking along the Main Street and Go station after a majority of residents have access to a reliable transit service.
• Consider limiting the number of parking spaces an employer can provide within the urban part of town (I personally don’t like it and if I were asked, would vote against it, but it worked for the City of  Redmond). 
• Another extreme opinion, that I am against, is to increase the subsidy up to 100%.  The town runs buses and people can ride them for free.  Nothing beats free.
• Plan new subdivisions with transit in mind.  I have written more about this in my “urban plan” series. 
• I wonder if, on routes with low ridership, running a couple of hybrid minivans is cheaper than running a large bus that costs not much less than half a million dollars to purchase. 
• EDIT: Should Milton think about running dynamic routes?  If you need a bus, you call a number, enter the stop # and go to the stop.  Based on demand, routes automatically adjust themselves to move people as optimally as possible.

Overall, I think transit ridership will naturally go up as the Derry Green Business Park comes online, Milton Education Village gets started and generally more people and jobs move to Milton.

So here are some of my ideas.  What are yours? 

This upfront planning will allow Milton to consolidate townhomes and condos (low to mid-rises) around major arteries.  Cities that have successful (and financially efficient) transit systems do so by increasing population density around major transit routes. 

Derry is a major artery into and out of town and yet if you drive on Derry, most construction you see around Derry is single family homes. New subdivisions have condos, village homes and town homes, but these are scattered all over the subdivision instead of being consolidated around transit routes.

That means two things:

1) either most people have to walk a lot to get to a bus, which isn’t always practical (and is a disincentive)
or
2) The town has to make buses to inside neighbourhoods to reach more people, which makes transit inefficient (and is a disincentive)