Let’s get an inter-municipal bus service rolling!

A St. Catharines transit bus takes a run through neighbouring Thorold. We need transit buses running through all Niagara's municipalities.

 By Doug Draper

If you were out there soaking in some of the last sunny days of summer and missed the news, one of the items that should not escape attention is our regional government’s decision to consider getting into the airport business.
That’s right. Niagara’s regional council passed a recommendation earlier this month, directing the region’s staff to enter negotiations with Niagara-on-the-Lake, the current owner of the Niagara District Airport, to possibly assume the ownership of an airport that, among other things, is troubled with “ongoing operating deficits,” according to the findings of a “Niagara Airports Study” completed for the region this summer.
I red flag this item not to suggest that the idea of the region taking over ownership of an airport is necessarily a bad thing. It maybe the right thing to do for Niagara’s economic future. What’s infuriating though  is that our regional council is actually considering getting into the airport business before we have a decent inter-municipal bus system in place.

It may be that a majority of our powers-that-be feel planes are sexier than buses. But maybe they ought to land on the ground and remember that they’ve had expert staff at the region and legions of consultants, recommending for years the need for an inter-municipal bus system for Niagara while Waterloo, York and many other regions across Ontario have been building on the successes of their regional transit services for the past 10 years.
If we are looking for reasons why Niagara has yet to make a mark as a more progressive, forward-moving region on this continent in the 21st century, I would hazard to say that our lagging behind when it comes to providing efficient, accessible inter-municipal transit services is one of them.
You can bring all the Go transit buses and trains from Toronto to Niagara you want. You can attract all the college and university students, and make all the overtures you want for younger people to stay here and older people who need t to get a doctors’ appointment, social gathering or some other place they want or need to go. If they don’t have a car or can’t buy or drive one for whatever reason, what bloody good will it do to keep and attract these folks to our region?
There have been no end of studies on the need for inter-municipal transit in our region – far too many to summarize in the space I have here and yet not enough, apparently, to convince a majority of our politicians to act on them.
This spring, the Niagara Community Observatory, a new agency working with the region and Brock University, released a study called ‘The Young are the Restless’ which concludes, in part, that one of the reasons young graduates are abandoning this region for opportunities elsewhere is that they can’t get around if they don’t have a car.
By the same token, there have been no end of older folks saying that one of the reasons they don’t like the Niagara Health System building the new hospital complex on western St. Catharines lands in north Niagara is that if they live in a more southern municipality in the region and don’t have a car to visit a loved one in that hospital, how do they get there back and forth from their in less than a day? Our regional councillors – a majority of whom granted the Niagara Health System more than $7 million in development fee exemptions from our taxes for that hospital sight – ought to answer that question by at least assuring these residents a timely system of buses to get them back and forth.
If a majority of our regional councillors are willing to grant the NHS more than $7 million in exemptions for the road improvements and other infrastructure needed to built the only new hospital our region is likely to receive provincial approval for over the next three to five decades in the wrong place, then a few extra million dollars a year to operate an inter-municipal bus system should be no object.
On the bright side, a new consultant report prepared for the region estimates that an inter-municipal bus system, complete with the additional buses needed to make it work, will cost somewhere between one-and-a-half and four-and-a-half million dollars a year.
That’s peanuts compared to what’s being spent on the NHS and it’s a small price to pay for a transit system that promises a greener, higher quality of life for all Niagara’s residents.
Doug Draper can be reached at drapers@vaxxine.com.