This is topic Shutting down the buses in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-23-2017, 02:08 AM:
 
In 1946 the provincial government decided that Saskatchewan was not being well served by the bus companies and established a government-owned bus line called Saskatchewan Transportation Company. STC provided passenger and freight service to almost all of the towns and villages in Saskatchewan ever since, and they interface with Greyhound in the major cities to transfer interprovincial freight and passengers between them.

STC loses a fair amount of money on its operations each year, which is not surprising since it was intended to serve communities that the major bus lines were not interested in serving. And now after 70 years the provincial government has just announced that they are shutting it down as they believe that the money can be better spent elsewhere.

This will put 224 people directly out of work, and leave most locations in Saskatchewan without any bus service at all, including Melville. Most of my movies currently arrive by bus and the bus depot is about a mile from my theatre so I usually just walk over there to pick it up. Now I'll either have to get stuff shipped by courier (for bigger dollars) or drive to Yorkton, which is served by Greyhound but is about 26 miles away.

It's inconvenient for me but it's going to leave a lot of people stranded -- old people in small towns who want to get to the city for an appointment and whatnot are going to be flat out of luck. And anyone who wants to get to a small town by bus is also out of luck; I guess taxis will be about your only option.

Some of the rinky-dink little roadside stores only exist because they're the local bus depot, too.

Who'da thought they'd actually cancel the provincial bus service? Sheesh. I don't think there are a lot of places that can't be reached by bus service of some kind in North America, but now Saskatchewan is one of them. Or will be; they're shutting it all down at the end of May.
 

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Posted by James Biggins (Member # 8574) on 03-23-2017, 05:14 AM:
 
Welcome to the 21st. Century Frank. Profit is the bottom line. Everything else is just a statistic.
 

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Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 03-23-2017, 06:19 AM:
 
Well that sucks.
 

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Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 03-23-2017, 10:20 AM:
 
We've used FedEx since digital came out. Way more convenient than when we used to have to use the bus (or drive to get films), they drop them right in our courier slot, cheaper too...
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-25-2017, 01:57 PM:
 
Supporting the economies of remote settlements was the main reason why government-run postal services were started in the first place. Commercial transportation, both for passengers and freight, works great if the person or object is going from and to densely populated locations, but is not viable if it isn't. So by having a government-run service that operates on a "one price to everywhere" basis, the price paid to mail a letter, say, from LA to San Francisco, will subsidize the cost of another one mailed from Davis Creek to Death Valley Junction.

If you wanted FedEx or UPS to take something from Davis Creek to Death Valley Junction, they would probably either flat out decline your business, charge you more than you could afford, take longer than you could work with, or both of the last two.

As Frank points out, in most cases these services more than recoup what they cost through the way they support consumers and businesses in these communities. Even the residents of Frank's town who never used that bus probably went to see a movie at his theater at least once or twice, which will have to pay more to ship DCPs once the bus service ends and may have to pass that cost on to its customers. It's always sad to see these services go, and IMHO very short-sighted to cut them.
 

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-25-2017, 03:02 PM:
 
Interestingly enough, public transit within the cities gets a pretty substantial subsidy ($30 million Canadian dollars from the federal, provincial and municipal governments for a new bus barn in Regina in 2016, for example) but nobody is talking about shutting down the city buses there.

The only reason these things operate at a deficit is because they have revenue. Many public services have no revenue (fire departments, public health inspectors, etc) so people don't judge them on that basis.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-25-2017, 04:05 PM:
 
Loss of that bus service is a symptom of a much bigger problem. Rural towns across the United States, and I presume Canada as well, are threatened with deaths of a 1000 cuts. Times are tough for small towns here in Oklahoma. They're struggling badly to provide basic services one expects from any municipality (police, fire dept, schools, water, sewage, garbage removal, streets, etc.). A bunch of my father's family lived in Temple, OK. For the past few years that town has been without a police dept.; forcing the Cotton County Sheriff's Dept. to pick up the slack. When towns like these lose their ability to have K-12 schools it puts them on the track to die off. Some small towns are going broke just trying to keep streets paved.

Most young people now leave small towns and rural areas and head to the cities for a better range of job opportunities and social connections. That leaves the local small town economy in a constrictive population pyramid -more older people and fewer people of working age and younger. Even older people are having an increasingly difficult time staying in small towns due to the lack of health care services and distance away from larger hospitals. The ones who can afford to do so (and can manage to sell their property) will leave.

Large cities and Megapolis zones like metro Dallas Fort Worth are drawing in lots of people from these small towns.
 

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Posted by Dave Bird (Member # 490) on 03-26-2017, 10:53 AM:
 
Where do your drives ship from Frank?
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-26-2017, 12:09 PM:
 

quote: Bobby Henderson

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Most young people now leave small towns and rural areas and head to the cities for a better range of job opportunities and social connections.

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I think another factor is, parents "encourage" them to leave by saying things like "there's nothing for you here." That happens around here all the time, even though we have a lot of small businesses here which make good incomes for their owners. Nobody wants to encourage their kids to stay and take over the family business anymore, so that leads to outsiders coming in and taking them over. Sometimes that works out, but not always, especially if the new owner wants to make drastic changes to the tried-and-true business model.

We've had better luck here with the farms and ranches; quite a few of them have been (or are being) taken over by the next generation, although even a few of them have "sold out" to giant corporations which own thousands of acres over a huge area.

Being one of the "next gen" people myself, I wouldn't trade living in a small town for anything. I'm only a 75-minute drive from the biggest city in the state, but about 98% of my needs are met right here. I have a three minute commute to work, and I can walk down the street any time of the day or night and feel perfectly safe.

We don't have any kids, but I have a large family with lots of nieces, nephews and etc. Zero of them have expressed any interest in taking over either of my businesses when I get ready to retire, partly due their parents insisting that they "have to get out of here."

We do still have local bus service, though.
 

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-26-2017, 12:54 PM:
 

quote: Dave Bird

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Where do your drives ship from Frank?

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quote:

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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 by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-09-2018, 10:58 PM:
 
I don't really see why the bus has been abandoned so much - it's cheap transportation. Admittedly some of the bus passengers tend to be on the scary side.
 

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Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 07-10-2018, 06:50 AM:
 
Public transportation might work in a busy city, were you can have an almost-round-the-clock schedule and never have to wait much longer than 15 minutes for a bus or train connection. In many busy cities, public transports beats the car, simply because you don't have the hassle of finding a spot to park your car.

But any public transportation in a more or less rural area I've been using has been a major pain, if there is any. You often lose all kinds of flexibility, you're stuck with unreal travel times and a million stops from a to b.

Even though all the traffic jams and parking problems, in many cases, still nothing beats a car.
 

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Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 07-10-2018, 07:04 AM:
 
Regarding Rural Movie Theatres and hard drive shipments:

The solution is DCDC (Deluxe/Technicolor's Satellite system). I just wish they would cater more to the small community movie theatres. 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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Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 07-10-2018, 11:04 AM:
 
I visited the booth of our local non-profit art house theater yesterday and found that many of their DCPs are delivered over the Internet with the rest delivered on hard drives. I had hear of Internet delivery being used a lot in Europe, but not much in North America. But, maybe that's an option. It seems Internet delivery can be more economical than satellite for content that is distributed to a smaller number of theaters (art house). I don't know how the business side of DCDC works, but if they are supplying the receive equipment for free, there may be a minimum number of screens they will do that for (which makes it cheaper than shipping a bunch of hard drives). But, maybe a single screen could pay for the equipment and then get delivery over satellite.

Good luck!

Harold
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 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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