The city spent nearly $182,000 to provide transit services from mid-February to June 30, when local buses were suspended indefinitely again pending a possible new service contract.
The city hasn’t released the cost of the transit contract publicly, but payments to Maple Bus Lines, which was awarded the contract at the end of January, on cheque registers reviewed by council monthly show that it received $181,896.22 in payments from February to June, though some are for smaller amounts that may be unrelated to providing transit services.
The city has not yet responded to requests for information about how many riders took the bus between Feb. 11, when service resumed, and June 30, when it ended, or how much they collected in bus fares during that time. It has not yet publicly disclosed the costs for bus service and the amount of fares collected and number of riders for the 11 months that transit was running in 2018, before Greyhound shut down its operations in Western Canada and stopped providing buses, drivers and maintenance services to the City of Thompson on a contract basis.
The School District of Mystery Lake paid $7,839 to the city for bus fares on behalf of students who took the bus without paying in February and March. That works out to about 5,200 round trips at a cost of $1.50 each way.
In 2017, the city paid Greyhound $424,192.12 for its services and collected $95,842.20 in bus fares from roughly 53,000 riders, mostly during the school year. That means the cost to the city of operating the transit system was approximately $328,000, more than it had been during a five-year agreement with Greyhound from 2011 through 2015, when the average annual cost was about $273,000.
If the costs of the temporary contract with Maple Bus Lines for four-and-a-half months this year were applied for a whole year, the city would spend $474,230 for transit service, minus any fares collected, which is about 12 per cent higher than what it paid Greyhound in 2017 before collected fares were deducted.
Thompson was without bus service from Nov. 1 of last year to Feb. 10 of this year. If service resumes in September, which the city says is the plan, though no firm date or date of any kind for this to happen has been set, Thompson will have had bus service for 140 of 304 days dating back to Nov. 1, minus any holidays when buses didn’t run.
This isn’t the first time in Thompson’s history that bus riders have left to their own devices. Bus service was suspended in April 1977 when Ken Thiessen, owner of the original Thompson Bus Lines, which had operated local transit since 1975, rejected the city’s offer of an operating subsidy of $60,450. Then-mayor Tom Farrell said at that time that he expected there to be a one-month suspension of service before a new operator could be found. In fact, a decision on whether to even continue having a city bus service was not made until a referendum was held on the same day as the municipal election that Oct. 26 (residents voted 1,947-1,116 in favour of bus service) and a new operator had not been found by the time New Year’s Eve arrived.
