The City of Kamloops saw a spike in transit use last year of nearly five per cent.

Development services director Marvin Kwiatkowski brought a report to council this week which says there were more than 10,000 transit rides per day on average, and 3,665,000 for the year overall.

“That may start to ramp up more. You look at what we’re doing in the downtown with the transportation choices study. It’s all about what can we do to increase pedestrian movement, cycling, transit, car share,” Kwiatkowski says.

“The expectation is you’re going to wait longer at a signal. So you’re going to wait potentially an extra cycle, which you see if you’re driving during rush hour, you wait a little while if you’re going up Summit or Columbia. So there’s different factors that if it starts to be less convenient, you start to look at other options.”

Overall transit use has grown by 21 per cent since 2008 according to the report. While the report from city staff says that increase outpaces similar-sized cities, it also points out that back in 2008 city staff had a goal to increase transit use by 50 per cent by 2020, which it says will take “extreme growth”to reach that mark.

Kwiatkowski points out there were different staff members involved in that planning and acknowledges a 50 per cent increase in that time may have been a far-fetched goal.

“If you’re gaining a couple per cent every year on average that’s probably not a bad thing. But population increases by what, one-and-a-quarter per cent? So in my view, we want to do better and there’s room on a lot of the busses. So there’s room to do better for sure.”