It’s been said in this space before, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of urgency on the part of the city when it comes to either finding a new bus company to operate city transit or just coming clean and saying that it won’t be a service that the city can or will provide any longer.
To be fair, the current group of councillors didn’t create the problem, though some of them, including the mayor, were members of the body that didn’t exactly jump on making sure that there would be no interruption in city transit to replace Greyhound after it ceased all its Western Canadian operations Oct. 31.
The letter that Greyhound sent to the city was mailed in mid-July, so the previous council definitely had their hands on it by the time August rolled around, which gave them three months to have a new operator in place. But hey, it was summer, and so it seems like they sat on their hands a bit and it wasn’t until Aug. 14 that the creation of an ad hoc committee to study transit options was announced. It then took nearly two months before the city put out a request for proposals and, when it did, the timeline for interested companies to submit was only seven days away, which resulted in the two proposals that were received not being as detailed as the city wanted, which meant that, come Nov. 1, transit users were left out in the cold, less than a week after the city finally officially announced that transit services would be suspended for at least a couple weeks, which has now stretched to three weeks and is likely to continue at least until early December.
The problem may not have been of their making, but it is the new council’s issue to deal with now and, not only are they new to the job, but they also have a lot on their plates, including a trip to the Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) conference for some, and an already-later-than-usual budget process that needs to get underway so that it can be complete by next spring when the budget has to be submitted to the province.
If it looks like there is no way that the city can continue to offer local bus service to its residents, they should inform everybody as soon as they can so that those with no other way of getting around can either organize some transport options of their own, like car pools, or invest the money they would have spent on bus fare on warmer clothes to get them through the winter months as pedestrians. If it doesn’t seem like the proposals they have received are up to snuff, then the request for proposals should be reissued, this time with a deadline far enough away that interested operators have enough time to dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s before making their submissions.
The situation faced by would-be transit riders, who have shelters to wait in for buses that won’t ever come, is also an illustration of how important it is for council and city administration to be proactive instead of reactive. The previous should have council gotten to work the moment they should have realized that Greyhound was definitely not going to be remaining in Thompson to operate transit services – which should have been July 9, the day that the company announced it was abandoning all but one bus route in Western Canada. Had they been paying attention however, the signs were there as far back as nearly a decade ago, when Greyhound first said that it was planning to abandon all its bus routes in Manitoba, a decision it later reversed with the incentive of government subsidies. Several years later, at the end of 2015, when a five-year contract to operate the city buses with Greyhound came to an end, the company essentially declined to enter another long-term service agreement and instead operated it on a month-by-month basis, invoicing the city as it went along. Either of those things should have served as a major hint that Greyhound did not necessarily see itself sticking around Thompson or Manitoba or even Western Canada for the long haul. Had efforts begun back then to find another company that would be willing to agree to operate city transit over the long term, maybe people who ride the bus, many of whom are students who don’t yet have the option of driving, wouldn’t have been left in the lurch.
