City Says Yes to Requesting Boost to Transit
Prince George, B.C.- Transit Service is a priority for Prince George City Council, and expanding service is on the City’s wish list.
The City would like to increase service in the evenings, on weekends and on statutory holidays. The expansion would add another 2500 hours of service and would provide an opportunity to attract new riders who currently don’t use transit because it isn’t meeting their entertainment weekend and holiday needs.
Improved transit was one of the recommendations in the Student White Paper on Student Needs.
The improved service also calls for the addition of one more community bus to improve service in the Hart. The addition of that bus would increase service by 1050 hours.
The cost to the City of the increased service and additional community bus would be $157 thousand dollars.
While the application for increasing the service is being submitted now, it is expected the increased hours of operation wouldn’t be implemented until September of 2017 and the additional community bus would be in service September of 2019.
Council has unanimously approved submitting an application for the additional service.
Comments
I watch the buses now go by with 2 or 3 people in them,and yes a lot of seniors depend on them.
But how much more is this going to increase our taxes.
Vernon just removed a bunch of there stops because they were to many to close together’ and saved thousands doing it.
Maybe part of the reason it’s often empty is because it’s inconvenient. There could be a bus from the Hart or College Heights right downtown, but there isn’t. It would make sense to add those routes. I feel that if transit were to do a better job of making it easy to people to ride the bus, they would. In other cities, it’s an expected and standard form of transportation. Here it’s awkward to get to anywhere but Spruceland or the mall, and while nice, the city doesn’t always revolve around those places. Transit needs a total overhaul on their routes and schedules. Simply adding to the current ones doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I’m with you on this, total overhaul is kind of necessary. I used to take the bus to UNBC when I was a student to save money, and I was lucky I had my truck as a back up. If I had class at 830am I had to be at the bus stop near Tabor and Otway by 7:06am (yes, an hour and a half ahead). The transfer to the 15 from the 8am bus would get me to the University at 8:35 at the earliest, 5 minutes late for class, so it was be late or be an hour early. Sometimes the bus would be even later and I’d be missing the 15 transfer and not end up in class until 30 minutes late, so those days it was nice to run back to my truck and drive it up the hill.
Similarly the travel home was garbage. 30 minutes to bus from UNBC back to that same spot, and if I missed the transfer to the 1 (which happened a few times because the 15 was late) I had to either wait at the base of the hill for an hour (the 1 and 11 are hourly buses), or walk home (which was significantly faster, so I did that, but in -20 weather it wasn’t very pleasant).
I could literally walk between 15th and 1st Ave along Tabor and meet up with the #1 bus at 1st/Tabor that I saw driving away at 15th/Foothills that I just missed. We have no buses that do a straight shot down Tabor from Ospika to 15th, there are three different ones covering stretches of that route on an hourly schedule. And that’s just in one area of town that I’m familiar with…
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