You Are Invited To Meet On The Bus For A Lively Discussion On Building A Better Niagara

By Doug Draper

If you are among us older types who feel that today’s young people are not as interested as involved as they should be in making our communities better places to live and work in, you should have attended a meeting at the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario campus of Niagara College this February 8.

Niagara College student Jeff Sinclair talks up active citizenship and supporting regional transit. Photo by Doug Draper

The meeting, attended by more than 60 students and members of public agencies and businesses from across the region, was titled “Active Citizenship: An Interactive Discussion on Building a Better Niagara” and featured some inspiring presentations by students who have volunteered their knowledge and skills in developing countries around the world and are now anxious to apply them to bettering life for their fellow citizens here.

The meeting also focused on a recently launched, student-driven initiative called ‘Meet on the Bus’ where anyone in the Niagara community can participate in discussions on how we can all work together to make Niagara better and “celebrate and support” Niagara’s fledgling regional transit system at the same time.

Jeff Sinclair, a student at Niagara College who, along with his wife Jennifer, a Niagara College graduate in  public relations who is self-employed as a community development facilitator and project management consultant, helped set up ‘Meet on the Bus’ are learning about the launch of the regional transit service as a two-year pilot project last fall.

“We were really surprised that (the Niagara Region Transit system) was only on the road for two months and already there was talk of shutting it down, and this is wrong,” said Jeff during a short presentation he made during the Active Citizenship meeting. A new transit system like this, he said, “needs more time for ridership to grow” and the operators need time to address the challenges they face in marketing it and serving a geographic area as large as Niagara.

 In a recent commentary he shared with Niagara At Large, Jeff added that “anyone who thinks that a new public service should be profitable from the beginning clearly has public services confused with the private sector, and clearly doesn’t understand private sector startups either. The bus system works like the internet – the more pervasive it becomes, the more self-reinforcing it is. If the internet was fragmented like Niagara’s bus system, it wouldn’t work well either. We need to support the regional bus until it reaches its tipping point,” he said.

Click on this image to enlarge it for route stops and embarking times for February 22 Meet on the Bus event.

“The main argument that we need to create an effective public transportation system in Niagara is that there isn’t a well-functioning economic region in the world that doesn’t have a robust public transportation system. So the important question isn’t whether or not to have this system, but how can we make it work.”

The Sinclairs and their Meet on the Bus supporters invite you to join them on the bus the next time they board it to hold discussions with fellow Niagara residents on working together to address the challenges facing our region today.

The next Meet on the Bus will be held on Wednesday, February 22 starting at 6:10 p.m. when the Niagara Region Transit bus pulls out of the downtown St. Catharines bus terminal. The meeting, which will cost all who join it the $5 fare for the ride to Welland and back is one you can join on any stop the bus makes between the two cities. Just stay aboard for the conversation until the bus returns to the stop where it picked you up. You can visit the Meet on the Buss website or go to the map featured on this post for the schedule of stops for this particular bus ride. Just click on the map to enlarge it.

“We hope you can join us for this Meeting on the Bus,” say the Sinclairs in a promo for the ride. ”Please feel free to invite other guests to join us in this conversation about  Active Citizenship: Building a Better Niagara.”

You can also become a regular visitor to the Meet on the Bus website for information on future events on the bus.

For more information on Niagara Region Transit visit www.niagararegion.ca/transit . 

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