The City of Thompson should have two new, smaller buses for providing transit services by spring of next year after council approved their purchase from Crestline Coach Ltd. at their Aug. 10 meeting.
The total cost for the two buses will be about $403,000 plus tax, including optional accessories, some of which is covered by a federal-provincial grant. Those options will include GPS, which will give the city the ability to provide live updates on transit service and schedules based on the actual location of the buses.
The buses must be delivered to the city by March 31, 2021.
The $235,681 infrastructure grant that the city received in the spring of 2017 was for a handivan, a bus, two bus shelters and a transit bus. The grant was intended to cover about 30 per cent of the cost of a bus worth about $400,000.
The new buses, similar to some models used by City of Calgary transit, are less than 30 feet long and accommodate up to about 20 passengers, including two to three wheelchairs.
The city announced a plan to establish a weekday-only transit system using smaller buses in late October 2019, nearly a year after Greyhound Canada shut down its Western Canada operations and stopped operating the transit service in Thompson on Oct. 31, 2018. It awarded a tender to provide transit services to Maple Bus Lines in December, but city transit has been suspended since March 20 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the drastic drop in ridership that occurred when schools were shut down.
Prior to transit service resuming for not quite three months at the outset of 2020, it was suspended for the last six months of 2019 after Maple Bus Lines provided city-funded transit services from mid-February to the end of June last year. Before that, it was suspended for three-and-a-half months after Greyhound pulled out.
