BC Transit is currently conducting a review on the entire system, including bus fares.
Iris Brown, BC Transit Government Relations Manager for the north, addressed Quesnel City Council on Tuesday night.
“Another BC Transit initiative which we’ve started to conduct is a fare review in collaboration with municipal staff. The last fare review for Quesnel Transit was quite a while ago in 2010.”
City Councillor Mitch Vik questioned that timeline.
“I believe that’s far too long especially considering inflationary pressures on budgets and the real cost of delivering the service. Is there a way to entrench in an agreement that fares can automatically increase or at least there’s a trigger that compels the discussion on a regular basis ?”
Vik suggested tying an annual increase to the Consumer Price Index or some other matrix.
Council will likely get a recommendation on them in April.
Any changes, if there are any, would then be implemented in July.
As for the overall review, Brown said that will take a little longer.
“The goal of the service review is to meet the needs of the community, identify gaps, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement and design transit planning with the provincial and community transportation goals. The goal would be to start this in the summer, and the plan would be to present the recommendations the following year.”
Councillor Martin Runge, who is a teacher, had a suggestion for that review.
“I was going to use the bus this year for a number of my students at the school here and I was shocked actually. I’m here at Correlieu, so I’m on the west side at route number 1 I believe, and to get to the college was an hour and 15 minutes during lunch. I thought what we’re really missing here is an express bus that maybe goes three times a day, once in the morning to get people to work, once in the afternoon to get them home, and once at lunch to move people around that comes from the west side directly through downtown and up to the north which is about a 20 minute drive.”
Runge said he felt a service like that would be much more beneficial to a lot of people.
Brown also talked about another initiative that would see medium duty fleets replaced by larger and smaller ones due to maintenance issues.
Quesnel has two medium duty buses.
She said Ministry staff were working on a transition plan.
BC Transit says the system delivered 85,800 passenger trips in Quesnel in 2024-25, up from 83,300 the previous year.
