Canada-wide Motorcoach Travel Survey<\/a>: a five minute questionnaire for anyone with thoughts, experiences and aspirations to share on the future of Canada\u2019s intercity bus network.<\/p>\n\u201cThere\u2019s an awful lot of social and economic opportunity that just goes down the drain when you have a totally car dependent society,\u201d says Johnson. \u201dNot to mention all the pollution impacts, and all the costs. The physics of individual cars are really very bad. And they don\u2019t even get much better when it\u2019s an electric car.\u201d<\/p>\n
Transport Action favours public transport options because, \u201cif you have a lot of people sharing a vehicle, not only can you massively improve the economics, you can include everybody,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cThat\u2019s the other angle we\u2019re looking at here, is making sure every Canadian has the ability to travel in our country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The survey will be live for another week or so, says Johnson, and asks questions like, \u201cwhat are your pain points? Where did you used to travel that you can\u2019t travel now? Or where would you like to be able to travel? We want to try and get a good overview of what it is people really are experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The goal is to find possible policy solutions, says Johnson, \u201cto make this industry functional again. Because at the moment it\u2019s a very dysfunctional industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you accept the social, economic, and environmental case for functional intercity bus service in Canada, the next question is how to achieve it. There\u2019s a mash up of different services available now in the country, some private, some public, some connected to each other, some not.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there was a case for a four-lane highway, then presumably, there\u2019s also a case for a bus, so the people who do not have a car or do not drive can also use what is clearly a major route between two places,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cWhat\u2019s difficult, is working out how to do this in a way that actually works very well for the industry and works very well for the taxpayer and the passenger at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson acknowledges calls for nationalization of the intercity bus business, but says Transport Action\u2019s recommendations will likely take a \u201cmore nuanced approach.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bus service in the Maritimes, believe it or not, is much better than many other parts of the country right now because of Maritime Bus, a private operator that managed to survive the pandemic, with some government support.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaritime Bus are exactly the kind of Canadian-owned business success story that we really ought to be celebrating a bit more in this country,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cThey had a hard time getting any support from the federal government to keep operating through the pandemic, even though they were incredibly innovative in doing things like putting in plexiglass screens between seats, because they knew how essential their service was to people in the Maritimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Maritime Bus services did suffer during the pandemic, and the service cannot connect beyond the Maritimes due to a lack of cooperation from neighbouring providers, like Orleans Express, which runs a service between the Gaspe and Montreal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of opportunity to make a difference and create value that\u2019s lost when you don\u2019t have the connectivity,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cIf you put a twig in water, you might be lucky and have it grow for a little bit. But if you leave the twig attached to the tree, it would do alright.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson says the gold standard in Canadian bus service used to exist in Saskatchewan, up until 2017, when an austerity budget killed the Saskatchewan Transportation Company and sold off its assets. The STC served hundreds of small towns and communities in Saskatchewan, with daily services. But the service was being subsidized by about $10 million per year, and so Brad Wall\u2019s government scrapped it.<\/p>\n
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are now studying the impacts of killing the STC, particularly on the province\u2019s beleaguered medical system.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an increasing body of research that points to loss of core mobility services as being something that actually ends up costing us an absolute fortune,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cBecause people\u2019s medical problems are not been treated early enough, etc. And then the cost of the healthcare system becomes higher.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the pieces that mobility touches,\u201d says Johnson, \u201cyour health, education, access to employment, social connections\u2026 that was worth so much more than $10 million a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Canada-wide Motorcoach Travel Survey will wrap up at the end of this summer, and the policy report is expected in the fall.<\/p>\n
You can fill out the survey here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A national advocacy group for public transport wants to bring intercity buses back to life in Canada, and they are reaching out to passengers and travellers across the country to help gather their views and experiences. CHMA spoke with Transport Action Canada president Terry Johnson to find out more: \u201cAbout 40% of the population does…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":112917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2602],"tags":[5342,5175,18117,18120,18119,18118,3277],"radio":[227],"origine":[274,275,277],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112922,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112906\/revisions\/112922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112906"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=112906"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=112906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}