In a move that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Greyhound Canada informed the City of Thompson that it will no longer be providing drivers, storage and maintenance services for Thompson’s transit buses effective Oct. 31, the day it stops running its Western Canadian inter-city bus routes for good.
“As you may know, Greyhound recently announced that it has made the difficult decision to downsize its Canadian business and in connection with such reductions will end all routes in Manitoba on October 31st, 2018,” said a July 18 letter from Greyhound Canada regional vice-president Peter Hamel. “Accordingly, this serves as Greyhound’s notice to the City that Greyhound is terminating the Agreement effective as of the 31st day of October, 2018 (the “Termination Date”).
The city paid Greyhound $1,364,393 over five years from 2011 through the end of 2015 to provide these services and has been on a month-to-month contract with them since 2016. Some of the operational costs are covered by the province. The price of the service since 2016 varied because the city paid Greyhound $800 a day for standby buses on days when the two city-owned transit buses were being repaired.
Greyhound was the only company that responded to the city’s bid for contract transit services in 2010, at which time purchasing agent Joyce Koop said that if the city were to operate the transit service itself, it would need storage facilities, four full-time drivers, mechanical support and additional equipment like a bus hoist.
The City of Thompson began considering what route to take with its transit service when Greyhound announced it was shutting down Western Canada routes in July, assuming, correctly as it turned out, that the company would not be providing contract transit services after Halloween.
“In the past as a general statement we have looked at the cost benefit of operating the transit system as a city enterprise but it’s always been more cost effective to do what we have done and contract the service out,” said Mayor Dennis Fenske in July. “Given the extent of the announcement we will have to again examine our options that would fall between the extremes of no service to continuing to run what we currently have at the cost of the operation.”
