posted 07-09-2018 05:58 PM                       

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Greyhound will stop running buses in almost all of Western Canada this fall, blaming sharp declines in ridership.

The company is pulling out entirely from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. It will no longer operate in British Columbia, except for the Vancouver-to-Seattle route served by its U.S. counterpart. And it will stop running buses in northwestern Ontario.

Routes in the rest of Ontario and in Quebec will continue, the last vestiges of what was once a national bus line that has operated in Canada since 1929.

The cuts – which would be effective at the end of October and mean job losses for 415 people – come after the company applied last fall to slash service in northern British Columbia effective June 1. At the time, Greyhound Canada senior executive Stuart Kendrick said the company had “no immediate concerns about the long-term viability” of its other routes.

However Mr. Kendrick said Monday that the ridership situation has worsened and is down 41 per cent since 2010.

“It’s an accelerating problem in rural Canada,” he said. “A lot of the corridors and routes that we operate have a lot of peaks and valleys, but more valleys, where the ridership on some routes, a lot of the routes, are in the single digits. And to sustain a viable network you need to have those numbers up in the 30s.”

The cuts threaten to leave stranded residents in the many hundreds of communities that dot the current bus routes, and pose a thorny problem for governments. British Columbia began a one-year pilot project to operate bus service in the north of that province, replacing routes cut by Greyhound. That government, and the ones that lead the provinces to the east, now face a much larger problem.

Although the importance of the bus faded over the decades as more Canadians acquired private vehicles, many rural residents don’t have access to automobiles of their own. A 2010 report by Transport Canada warned that lack of transportation is “a top concern” for seniors in rural areas, a demographic that will gradually form a bigger share of the population.

“If even a portion of these older Canadians cannot or choose not to drive, communities will need to carefully rethink personal transportation options,” says the report on sustainable transportation in small and rural communities.

“Providing efficient transportation services for seniors can also have added benefits to the wider community. By providing seniors with more transportation alternatives, seniors may be able to stay in their homes for longer periods of time, which could in turn decrease the demand for long-term care residences.”

Greyhound has gradually been chipping away at its coverage, reducing service and cutting routes. It was a risky strategy that threatened to reduce the bus’s viability as a transportation option.

“One could say that by reducing frequency that could impact some of the routes that you have left, and there’s definitely some truth to that,” Mr. Kendrick conceded. “But at the end of the day, when you have your frequency almost down to a minimum and you still aren’t seeing the ridership to be sustainable, that’s where we’re at today and unfortunately the tough decision that we’ve had to make.”

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posted 07-10-2018 01:57 PM                       

quote: Dennis Benjamin

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I'm about to ask them if they will put a satellite at a one screen location in a rural area and I doubt they will do it.

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