For Sake of a More Affordable, Livable, Carbon-Free Future, Niagara’s Transit System Should Be Spared Regional Council’s Budget Axe

“Better use of transit can save governments and taxpayers many of the hidden costs of urban travel, including road building, maintenance, parking, land cost, policing, accidents and environmental impacts.” – Canadian Urban Transit Association at Home – CUTA (cutaactu.ca)

A News Commentary by Doug Draper

Posted December 4th, 2023 on Niagara At Large

“I find Niagara doesn’t have the culture of riding the bus. It (this lack of culture) is inbred (and) it has been that way for a long time,” said Welland Regional Councillor Leanna Villella at a meeting of Niagara Region’s budget review committee this past November 30th.

Mat Siscoe, a Regional Councillor for St. Catharines, the Niagara municipality where he also serves as mayor and where, as a city councillor, played a lead role in in bringing together transit services in St. Catharines Niagara Falls, Welland and other area municipalities in finally creating a single Regional transit system that was officially launched, this past January 2023.

At the November 30th budget review meeting, Siscoe had this to say about a “transit culture” in Niagara and why he feels Niagara’s regional government needs to one and not cut transit services and hike fares for bus riders as some regional councillors appear ready to do.

“The point has been made that we don’t have a transit culture,” said Siscoe said as part of his overall defense of a budget t7.8 per cent budget increase the Niagara Regional Transit Commission recently put before the Region’s council.

“We have undercut transit in Niagara for decades,” he said, adding that Ottawa, as an example, “didn’t have a transit culture 60 years ago (but) a transit culture was created. Ottawa made the decision to fund transit appropriately (and ridership significantly improved).”

Niagara is “not going to create a transit culture if, less than a year after (an amalgamated transit system was finally launched in Niagara) the first step is to undercut the (transit) budget.”

Siscoe stressed that “people using the system are predominantly low-income people. …

“A fare hike ,” he said, “would affect them 10 times more” than the transit commission’s budget increase would affect home and business owners through property taxes.

Niagara Regional Chair Jim Bradley said he doesn’t want to see cuts in transit services or fare increases because, as someone who years ago sat on St. Catharines’ transit commission, he knows that fare increases discourage ridership.

However, those on regional council who don’t want to see service cuts and fair hikes, yet want to keep the Region’s overall budget increase down, “can’t have it both ways.”

“We have to face the electorate and the people of this Region,” said Bradley as he cited the many complaints regional councillors and staff received from people over the 7.58 per cent increase in last year’s overall budget.

“When the tax bill comes out,” said Bradley, people “will be looking to us” and they will be asking “did you (as members of council) find any efficiencies anywhere.”

Erik Johnston, a Niagara Falls resident who took well over an hour on the current transit system to appear before the regional council as a one-person delegation, argued passionately that “transit is critical to our region” and needs more funding to improve service, not less.

Johnston said other regions in Ontario like Waterloo and Brampton are a decades ahead of Niagara in building a bus system that is more attractive for people, who might otherwise need a car, to use.

The investment those regions have made in public transit has allowed them to “break records” in ridership that have helped cover the cost of their transit systems.

Indeed, it was about two decades ago that this reporter. a few years after I quit my newsroom job at the once-proud St. Catharines Standard in the late 1990s and began freelancing for other newspapers and magazines first contacted Eric Gillespie who once was the manager of the St. Catharines Transit System, but by then was managing the transit system in the Region of Waterloo.

Gillespie, who tried his best to advocate for a regional transit system in Niagara while he was still here, told me that when Waterloo’s regional government took over transit from Kitchener and other local municipalities in that region, ridership more than doubled in the first few years and the provincial and federal governments began rewarding that region with more funding for transit and more Go Train service from the Greater Toronto area because they knew people could get off a Go Train and catch and conveniantly board a regional bus to get them to where they wanted to go.

It was a shining example of a line from the movie ‘Field Of Dreams that Siscoe quoted at the used at the November 30th budget review meeting – “Build it and they will come.”

Niagara, on the other hand, continued putting on the brakes around almost any and all efforts to build a regional system, even when those efforts were made by former Niagara regional chairs like Debbie Zimmerman and Gary Burroughs.

Finally, in 2011, while Burroughs was Regional Chair, a “pilot” regional system got off the ground with some strong support from then St. Catharines Mayor and regional councillor Tim Rigby, then Grimsby regional councillor Debbie Zimmerman and then Port Colborne mayor and regional councillor Vance Badawey.

But at least two consultant reports, paid for with a good deal of Niagara taxpayers money and prepared by experts in the public transit field, concluded that the “fragmented,” “patchwork” of this pilot service, along with other local transit systems in the region was a long way from doing the job for people who wanted or needed to use a bus.

The reports urged the regional government to move to one, seamless and accessible transit service.

Then along came four years of Al Caslin and his regional council where virtually nothing moved forward on the transit file.

Now here we are with only six members of regional council at the November 30th budget review meeting voting in favour of the budget the transit commission originally brought forword with the 7.8 per cent increase.

A total of sixteen other councillors attending the meeting voted to send the budget back to the transit commission to find some “efficiencies” it can bring back to the Region’s council for possibly final consideration on December 14th.

For those of us in Niagara who have been waiting for many years to build a better transit system that would reduce our dependence on cars and the countless millions of dollars the Region and local municipalities have to spend on road maintenance and construction of roads.

How about the growing number of people who can’t afford a car and the role that public transit versus cars can play in address a climate crisis that this year saw record amounts of health-threatening extreme heat waves, along with unprecedented destruction to property and forests across our country and the rest of the world.

Investing more of our tax dollars to build a transit system that is affordable, not to mention more accessible and efficient to more riders would be a bargain compared to where we  are continuing to go now.

I could go on but I will leave the last word to St. Catharines Regional Councillor Haley Bateman, one of the six members of the budget review committee who voted in favour of the budget the transit commission brought forward earlier this fall with that 7.8 per cent increase it believes it needs to to replace old buses and build the  service for the future.

“This is something that we are trying to build and we don’t have the ridership yet but you have to invest in it if you want it to grow,” said Bateman.

‘I don’t think cutting it in any way, shape or form should be on our radar screen,” she added “I respect the fact that we have an affordability issue but this is how we support affordability for many residents because we have a whole generation of people who can’t afford practically anything.”

“We need to invest and we need to promote this service,” Bateman concluded. “To do anything less than that, to me, is unconscionable.”

Amen.

And if you agree with Bateman, Siscoe and others who support the transit commission’s efforts to invest more to build a transit service for the future, I urge you to raise your voice by contacting your mayors and regional councillors before the December 14th Regional Council meeting.

If you want to hear and watch the November 30thbudget review committee, click on the screen immediately below.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ho5mK2VPmT0%3Fsi%3DS7z6nst9GMB7fch5%3Frel%3D0%26autoplay%3D1

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