Good to hear about the turnout at Monday night’s council meeting over concerns with the cuts in bus service.
I have been a rider of our local buses for over 30 years, both as a young child and now as an employee going to and from work every day, and like many others was not happy to hear about these cuts to our service.
Let us go back to recent history to how these cuts came about. It seems these new buses, as wonderful as they are without the stairs, are costing the city more to run than the ones we had previously. Options were looked at by city council and implemented to try and recoup some of this new financial debt.
However, instead of giving more time to the process of recouping these funds and holding BC Transit accountable to make this situation right, we allowed BC Transit to provide city council with a report on how to cut services that admittedly had little information to base any figures on.
People who ride the buses are the ones who should be speaking on this issue and council should be getting information from their public. Those who do not even ride the bus and those who do not even live here are making decisions for us and they are poor decisions without public engagement.
Seniors, people with disabilities or mobility issues and even high school kids (peak ridership for school times according to BC Transit report) are the ones who will be affected the most.
Overall, these cuts just do not make sense, both in cutting out those who need the service the most (i.e. seniors) and in cutting out potential profit to balance the debt (i.e. high school kids).
Zoe Langlois
Nelson