The Cowichan Valley Regional District will send a letter to BC Transit requesting a meeting with its CEO and senior representatives to convey the need for expanded transit services in the region, and to urge BCT to re-evaluate its scoring criteria to determine what expansions will be funded.
The board decided to send the letter to BCT at its meeting on June 11 after it was recommended by the district’s electoral area services committee.
Jim Wakeham, the CVRD’s senior manager of facilities and transit management, told the board in April that, other than some funding to expand inter-regional services, the district has had no success this year with efforts to receive funding to expand bus services along some routes within the CVRD at this time.
He said many of the transit routes within the CVRD are scoring low on the criteria for expansions because they are mostly rural and their ridership is low.
Rachelle Rondeau, the district’s transit analyst, told the electoral area services committee at its meeting on June 4 that conventional transit service in the Cowichan Valley has not received funding to expand the transit service since 2018, limiting much-needed improvements.
She said there is a lot of interest in transit expansion in communities across B.C., but it appears that BCT is challenged in keeping up with demand with the funding they are receiving from the province.
“Some key items that are driving up demand are, for example, a backlog of unmet expansion from the pandemic, population growth in general, strong ridership growth in some communities, and there’s interest in expanding transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce traffic congestion, provide transportation for seniors and youth, improve affordability for transportation and expand active transportation,” Rondeau said.
“Without our conventional transit service expansion, we are very limited in our ability to improve transportation options in the community.”
Cowichan Lake South/Skutz Falls director Ian Morrison said his major concern is with what is essentially a freeze on new expansion hours for conventional service and the limitation of new hours coming to an area with low ridership.
“We are ultimately going to have to start cannibalizing some of our low ridership runs to enhance service, and the identified need of the new hospital run is one of those,” he said.
“So I’m fully supportive of wanting to engage in a meeting with [BCT] and exploring another way to score more spread out rural areas with lower ridership because the Cowichan Lake area has been a region of lower-income populations for decades and are most in need of transit service, yet the future looks bleak when it comes to the possibility of new hours, so I’m very supportive of the direction that we’re going.”
