The wheels of the bus go round and round at a painfully slow rate in Squamish.With only three active busses in town there is an average lag of 45 minutes to an hour between rides. The District of Squamish is working to cut down on rider aggravation by developing a five-year transit plan.
At an open house on Tuesday (Nov. 27), BC Transit and the district asked community members to suggest improvements to the service.
"You need to be able to count on it," said Patricia Wilson, who watched the last bus of the day whiz by five minutes early last weekend.
Wilson had taken her seven-year-old daughter up to Timbertown for a movie and dinner with her grandmother. She said missing their ride home put a damper on an otherwise good day.Reliability is just one of the problems plaguing the town's public transit system. Several people such as Bill Ross of Dentville said they would like to see more service running later into the night.
"I'm not going to knock it because I come from the city, but I'd like to see it run a little longer," said Ross. Currently, the last bus in town from Monday to Thursday leaves at 6:05 p.m.Accessibility advocate Sarah Tipler was less gentle in her criticism.
"It's brutal," she said. "I haven't tried for the last two-and-a-half years. They couldn't tell me if it was an accessible bus or not on my way to Brackendale."One of the final straws for Tipler came when she found herself on a bus with a driver who could not operate the lift. To help her get off, she said the driver and a rider picked her up and left her on a patch of gravel in a construction site.
"I thought, 'Wow, that's not good service,' " she said.
Eric Gumbel said simple changes, like redirecting the bus to Diamond Head Road rather than Highway 99 would make it easier to reach the walk-in clinic by Mamquam Road.
Community members put their suggestions into writing by filling out surveys and sticking notes with comments onto display boards.
BC Transit's Peter Murray said the feedback would help decide where extra funding for 2008 transit will be spent.Murray said with the help of provincial funding, this year's bus from Squamish to Whistler could continue year-round starting this spring.
He said there is also the option of creating a regular bus route between Squamish and West Vancouver. Each of these changes depend on district and provincial support since the price of a bus ticket in Squamish covers only 31 per cent of the operating cost.
But local residents have shown they are ready to ride with rising user rates. In the last 10 years, service has stayed at a flat rate while use has jump 50 per cent. In the period of '96 to '97 to '06 to '07 the number of rides rose from 98,824 to 146,670."We're definitely at that stage of expanding service and taking advantage of that trend," said Murray.
