Lots of cities have changed route names, riders were ok! We’ve changed routes before and it’s been fine. People endlessly tell me whether by email, in person, or in comments that Torontos wayfinding (Finch included is confusing) I’ve experienced it first hand!
Sorry, but I find this to be a shockingly hollow, borderline offensive justification for route changes. If you're going to start messing with names, numbers that have been set in stone over decades, you'd better have a far, far, far more compelling justification for doing so than "people survived previous changes".
In fact, I find your posts to be something of a contradiction. On the one hand, you push for clear, easy to read wayfinding signage (you'll get no disagreement from me here, but I find the hooplah about signage in Toronto of all places to be much overblown), but on the other hand, you're advocating for any duplicate numbered routes to be renumbered? What about the tens of thousands of people who already know the service by one identity?
I find the concern about duplicate route numbers doesn't really bear out with reality. I have spent my entire adult life working in customer service, I am well aware that the average person is shockingly dim, but the behaviour you are insinuating exists is beyond the realm of comprehension. I'm not aware of there being any routes at all that share a number that run on the same corridor, at any rate the amount of routes for whom this is true must be at the absolute bare minimum; therefore, you must be trying to tell me that there are people going to Long Branch GO, getting on MiWay's route 23 Lakeshore thinking they're getting on the TTC's 23 Dawes; that there are people getting on the 35 Jane bus thinking they're getting on MiWay's 35 Eglinton; that people are boarding the GO 21 Milton bus in search of the 21 Brimley in Scarborough, that people are at York University searching for the 501 Queen streetcar and getting on Brampton's 501 ZUM Queen; that people board the 92 Woodbine South bus thinking it's going to take them to Oshawa, as the GO bus 92 would. I find this notion to be inconsistent with reality - after all, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would research where it is that they want to go and how to get there, and would clue in, on arrival at Long Branch GO, that they are
not, in fact, at Main Street Station. And if such a person miraculously, wonderously, does exist, why should we spend public monies on trying to make it so that person would not be confused by such a base concept, instead of expecting them to have some level of awareness of the world around them? You cannot be serious.
Furthermore, in the suburbs, lots of people are occasional transit riders. What do you think would cause more confusion - a hypothetical strawman of a person who has difficulty distinguishing Queen and Yonge from York University, or the large group of occasional riders who find themselves needing to use transit, only to make their way to the stop and find that their local bus, by which identity they have known it for generations, is no more?
