Now 16 months after Greyhound left B.C., the province says 89 per cent of it’s long-haul bus routes have been filled by other operators.
The province says only Fort Nelson to Watson Lake on the Alaska Highway and Kamloops to Valemount on Highway 5 are former Greyhound routes without a long-haul bus.
Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Peter Milobar says some form of government subsidy is probably needed along the corridor through his riding.
“It’s definitely a longer run to go from Edmonton to Kamloops then say even Calgary to Kamloops. And so when you think of it, that’s the two major population nodes would be Kamloops and Edmonton, on the either side of that run. So I’m sure some of it has to do with the length of run with how few residents actually live along that corridor. That said, it’s still a very important transportation corridor.”
Greyhound left B.C. on Oct. 31, 2018. At that point, the province had said 83 per cent of its former routes in the province had already been replaced.
The mayor of Clearwater says there one bus option through the North Thompson to Kamloops but that it’s limited.
Merlin Blackwell says a bus does day trips from Blue River to Kamloops for medical appointments, which runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“And there’s a lot of desire from the users of the transit system to add a third day trip. And currently we’re kind of looking and bouncing around the idea of being able to afford maybe a Saturday. But we’re going to have to look at our partners in other communities to see if we can fund that,” Blackwell says.
“It’d be really great if we had a transit system. Logically for me, it seems like a Hinton- or Jasper-to-Kamloops bus route would be fantastic if that came about, for sure.”