PEI shuttle ends, Maritime Bus adds more runs

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A bus with a maple leaf and Maritime Bus branding on the side
(Photo – Ted Bartlett)

After 20 years of carrying passengers to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, PEI’s Advance Shuttle has shut down. The company was purchased by Maritime Bus in 2012, who continued to operate it up until its final run on January 6, 2017. Maritime Bus had concluded that the cost of running the shuttle service in addition to their own bus services was no longer justifiable.

Despite losing the shuttle service, passengers travelling between Charlottetown and Halifax will be gaining additional bus options, as Maritime Bus has added additional late day departures in either direction. These extra buses will also benefit people along various parts of the route, by adding additional travel options later in the day.

While further bus options are a good thing, some passengers will no doubt be disappointed by the loss of the door-to-door service that the shuttle provided. For example, those going to Halifax for doctor’s appointments used to be able to get dropped off directly at the hospital, while they will now be dropped off at the bus station.

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“Go Maritimes” provides useful tool for multi-modal transportation planning in Atlantic Canada

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Screenshot of the Go Maritimes website, with menus to enter travel end points, date, and search options.
A look at the Go Maritimes website. This tool makes it easy to see all of your various public transportation options for trips within the Maritimes.

Have you ever been trying to figure out how to use public transportation to travel between two places in the Maritimes, and had a hard time knowing if you’d found all of the options? If so, you’d do well to check out the valuable online transportation planning resource that is now available in the form of “Go Maritimes”. Founded by Wayne Groszko and developed in partnership with a number of individuals and local organizations (including the Ecology Action Centre, Dalhousie University, and the Province of Nova Scotia) Go Maritimes aims to make it easier for people to find the schedules for buses, shuttles, trains and other transport services to plan their travel in Canada’s Maritime provinces.

Trying to plan travel using public transportation in many parts of the Maritimes can be a challenge, and that often begins with simply being unaware of what options exist. With Go Martimes, users can enter any two end point destinations (where public transportation options exist) in the Maritime provinces and their desired travel date, and the site will then present them with the various options available, including specific schedules and estimated costs. Continue reading ““Go Maritimes” provides useful tool for multi-modal transportation planning in Atlantic Canada” →

Fewer trains, higher cost – VIA’s Tri-weekly Ocean continues to cost more than 6 day/week service

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Two yellow VIA Rail trains sit on tracks next to each other at the Halifax station on a sunny day.
Two Ocean train sets sit in Halifax on a sunny day about a year before the 2012 service cut. This is now a rare sight, only occurring when VIA runs extra trains over the holiday season. (Tim Hayman photo)

When VIA Rail cut service on the Montreal-Halifax Ocean in half back near the end of 2012, they claimed that the move was made to reduce the cost of running the service. The Ocean, like all of VIA’s services (and indeed, nearly all public transportation systems worldwide), operates at a net “loss”, with subsidies required to offset the operating costs of the service. Trains like the Ocean require a somewhat higher subsidy per passenger than VIA’s Corridor services, and VIA management was supposedly looking for ways to reduce spending across the system. So the Ocean was reduced from 6 day per week operation to only 3.

Passenger rail advocates, including Transport Action Atlantic, raised their voices at the time to warn of the implications of slashing the service. Examples from Canada and elsewhere in the world continue to show that frequency reductions are not an effective means of reducing costs – while they may result in some immediate cost savings, any cost reductions are offset almost without fail by greater reductions in ridership as a result of the less convenient service.

The problem with reduced frequency is that costs don’t come down enough, while revenues plummet. Reducing a service like the Ocean to a lower frequency does reduce some costs, but not all of them, as many fixed costs remain (e.g. maintenance of stations and other infrastructure, equipment costs, some personnel costs, marketing). In other words, a 50% reduction in train frequency does not result in a 50% reduction in costs. VIA’s numbers since 2012 back this up: in 2011, the Ocean cost $48,832,000 to operate 6 days per week. In 2013, that cost was reduced to $43,930,000 for 3 trains per week – a reduction of barely 10%.

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