The City of Kimberley has declined the opportunity to extend Monday daytime service to and from Kimberley and Cranbrook.
Currently, the only option for buses that run between Kimberley and Cranbrook are through the health connection service, which runs Tuesday to Friday, through scheduled pickups, at 8:30am, 11am and 2:15pm. However, a commuter service expansion is scheduled to begin on September, 5. This expansion includes the addition of ten trips per week. The trips will be available Monday to Friday, with one added trip in the morning and another in the afternoon.
Planning Services Manager for the City of Kimberley, Troy Pollock says the commuter service will be pick up only at the designated bus stops, there will not be opportunity to call ahead or reserve a seat. The morning pick up will begin at Townsite Grocery at 7:35am, then continue downtown to Shopper’s Drug Mart, then the Civic Centre Arena (lots of daytime parking available), then College of the Rockies - Kimberley Campus, with the last pick-up in front of Kingdom Hall/Petro Canada in Marysville. The bus will arrive in Cranbrook at the Downtown Transit Exchange at 8:15am, the Hospital at 8:18am and College of the Rockies at 8:20am. The schedule, stop info and fair prices will soon be posted to bctransit.com/kimberley.
“There will not be any change to the existing Tuesday to Friday daytime service schedule,” said Pollock.
The City was given the opportunity to extend Monday daytime service to match that of Tuesday through Friday, but declined due to the level of demand for daytime service not being clear.
At a regular City Council meeting on Monday August, 14 Polluck explained the expansion options to Council and there was little discussion before the vote to decline the Monday service expansion was made.
“With the new commuter service we think that’s possibly going to shake things up a bit on the ridership in Kimberley and Cranbrook,” said Pollock. “Our biggest fear would be committing to those [Monday daytime] hours; starting that five days a week, really not growing the ridership at all, kind of just spreading it out. The one biggest potential, I guess, by committing to these hours right now is [that] we should have the opportunity to back out if we decide we don’t want to commit to that. Transit would rather, if you’re going to commit to them, they want you to carry through with it.
“The other option that has been discussed is that there may be the potential to optimize the schedule. So if we did commit to the expansion and have that opportunity for five trips per day, there might be an opportunity to optimize the schedule better and have two earlier trips each day and two later trips each day with one in the middle, wherever that would best suit the ridership.”
“We’ve been kind of back and forth on this and there’s certainly some options that we also could accept or approve,” Pollock said. “With this small number of hours we should probably have the opportunity to look at this again next year. BC Transit’s not willing to say yes for sure there will be hours there, that they will be on the table, but they said that often times if there’s lots of additional hours available that they might be able to come from some other service somewhere else.”
If Council were to approve the additional Monday service, it would not require additional vehicles and would cost the City approximately $5,500 annually.
In a report to Council, Pollock explained that although the additional daytime service would provide Kimberley residents more opportunities for medical appointments and shopping in Cranbrook, the level of demand for additional daytime service is not clear at this time.
“The main concern is that the expanded service may shift ridership from other daytime trips rather than generate substantial new ridership and fare revenue,” said the report. “Staff recommends declining the current expansion opportunity and perhaps reconsidering for 2019/20 operating year. Once the commuter service has been operational for almost a year, we will have a better understanding of ridership and revenue implications and some early indication whether there is more demand for Monday daytime service or for optimization of hours to balance demand for commuter, shopping and health connection services.”