City of Powell River’s Zunga Bus pilot project will not be selected by BC Transit as its pilot project for digital on-demand busing.
At the September 20 committee of the whole meeting, councillors received a presentation from BC Transit’s Rob Ringma, senior manager for government relations. One of the topics he highlighted was the Zunga Bus.
In introducing Ringma, city chief administrative officer Russell Brewer recounted the timeline, indicating that in January 2020, council adopted the transit system vision and goals. He said one of the actions outlined was to explore on-demand transit.
“The Zunga Bus pilot was initiated in early 2021, with funding currently approved until the end of 2022, with one bus in the Westview area,” said Brewer.
He said the pilot review had three recommendations, including replacing bus route number three in upper Westview with an expanded Zunga service. Second was to consolidate routes one and two to create one linear cross-town service and increase the frequency. There was a third recommendation about co-mingling Zunga and handyDART for better user service and cost efficiency.
Ringma said with the Zunga Bus, the city had created its own on-demand busing service. He said BC Transit has been working for the last three to four years on a digital on-demand strategy. It started with research and advanced to a request for information, where they went out to different vendors to make sure BC Transit understood the criteria where digital on-demand was most feasible, he added.
In 2021, according to Ringma, BC Transit did two feasibility studies in Cranbrook and Kelowna. This year, the provincial crown corporation is implementing a digital on-demand service in Kelowna.
After launching in Kelowna, phase two of the project in 2023/2024 will involve working on-demand transit into some other systems. The long-range plan is to have digital on-demand as a suite of services, along with custom handyDART and the conventional transit system, added Ringma.
City councillor CaroleAnn Leishman said she was disappointed that any potential funding will be delayed until 2024. She said city officials had a meeting with minister of transportation and infrastructure Rob Fleming at the Union of British Columbia Municipalities and told him about the Zunga Bus project.
“I’m not hopeful that there will be a different outcome,” added Leishman. “I’m just hopeful that we can potentially utilize what we have established sooner than later.
“If there is any way that we can be considered to implement what we’ve already got and maintain the uniqueness of our Zunga Bus, I would love it if we could keep that uniqueness of what we’ve built, build on it and try to fund that.”
Councillor George Doubt said he was disappointed that Powell River was not chosen as the place to run the digital on-demand pilot since there is already a system in place.
He said the issue council is going to have to deal with is that it has been funded by the city.
“What I was hoping this report would see is some funding from BC Transit to extend the Zunga Bus until BC Transit is willing to participate more fully,” said Doubt. “I’d really like to see some BC Transit participation in paying for the Zunga Bus service in 2023 and 2024, because that is what we need to keep it going.”
Ringma said he appreciated the comment and that BC Transit was handcuffed by its strategy.
“What it is going to allow us to do over the next year is to do that full transit future service review, and that also includes qathet Regional District as well,” added Ringma. We are going to look at transit as a region and it will really help us flesh out where digital on-demand transit should be servicing.”
Councillor Cindy Elliott said she has been told that people would be housebound without the Zunga Bus because the regular bus system can’t help them. She asked if there were grant opportunities through BC Transit. Ringma said there was no additional grant money.
