BC Needs A Public Intercity Transportation Service

Northern British Columbia is a vast, mostly mountainous area where winter conditions often make travel hazardous and sometimes impossible.

In 2000, northern BC had three intercity transportation options: the public BC Rail passenger service between North Vancouver and Prince George; the private Greyhound bus line; and the public VIA Rail passenger service between Jasper and Prince Rupert.

There were serious problems with those services, the inadequacies being a major factor in the tragedy of the missing and murdered women along Highway 16, most of whom were Indigenous, and who, in the absence of adequate public transportation, often hitchhike.

Despite the inadequacies, many people still relied on those transportation options. 

In 2002, BC Rail passenger service was cancelled and in May 2018 Greyhound shut down all of its bus service in BC. Recently VIA Rail reduced its three-times-a-week schedule between Jasper and Prince Rupert to once a week. These cancellations and cutbacks, especially of bus service, have created a crisis in public transportation for the region.

For a number of years, Indigenous people, working with others, played a leading role in pushing various levels of government to address these serious transportation problems as specified in the 2006 Highway of Tears Recommendations Report. After 10 years they achieved an important success in having the provincial government launch the Community Transportation Grant Program in 2017 which provided $2.6 million to 11 communities for shuttle busing in rural and remote communities to supplement existing services. This funding has recently been expanded to 18 communities with $2.8 million in new money from a federal-provincial program. While these additional new grants will no doubt be welcomed at this time they are not secured for the long term. 

In 2018 the provincial government launched BC Bus North to replace routes abandoned by Greyhound. This was in addition to the Northern Health Connections service set up in 2006 for people travelling to and from medical appointments. 

Other than BC Bus North, intercity or inter-regional bus service continues to be very limited or non-existent. And while the BC Bus North service was created to address access issues, a recent Auditor General report titled Ensuring long-distance ground transportation in northern BC found several deficiencies including a lack of routes and frequency. These deficiencies disproportionately affect people with low incomes, those living in rural, remote and Indigenous communities and people with disabilities.

The group “Let’s Ride! Make Transit BC Wide”— which is backed by community groups, Indigenous leaders, student societies, climate justice organizations and others — has called for a publicly owned and “unified inter-community network” that guarantees access to the rest of the province. This is needed rather than simply patching up the fragmented mix of private, contracted out or community-based transportation providers that currently exist. This has led to a situation resulting in a combination of “good service, poor service and no service at all, depending on where you live.”

One thing is clear from the current situation: safe, affordable and accessible public transportation must be considered a right for all British Columbians and Canadians.

Peter Ewart and Dawn Hemingway are writers and community activists based in Prince George. Alex Hemingway is a CCPA-BC senior economist and public finance policy analyst.

 By Peter Ewart, Dawn Hemingway and Alex Hemingway

For any questions, please contact Jean Kavanagh at 604-802-5729, jean@policyalternatives.ca

TAN