We hear the mantra these days of helping the environment by taking public transit, but sometimes the talk means more of a walk for some bus passengers. Let’s not let poor transit service be the undoing of that environmental mantra. In this very issue of The Oshawa Express Newspaper, we learn that one passenger has helped to collect 1,000 names on a petition to restore a bus route to full-time service, rather than just operating during rush hour.
The residents are also calling for extending the route to include a 24-hour Wal-Mart
store and other popular shops that are grouped together.

Decreasing the times that the bus is available has meant inconvenience for passengers
and the need for some to find an alternative to get somewhere if they are on a schedule, like trying to get to work. In a previous issue of this newspaper, we also learned of college and university students being treated like cattle, herded on buses until they are crammed together and on the way to the slaughterhouse.

Seats are rearranged on the bus so that more people can stand, shoulder to shoulder. This certainly doesn’t sound like a comfortable ride for passengers on these buses. On top of this, these crammed buses once filled to capacity or worse then make a beeline to the post-secondary schools in the north-end of the city, bypassing other passengers who are waiting further along the same bus route for a ride to their classes. Durham Region Transit makes a call and more buses are added, but it’s rather frustrating for these passengers, who are forced
to wait as bus after bus rushes past, especially when you have to make an earlymorning
class. That’s not good service.

And that’s not promoting the use of public transit. For many years, the former Oshawa Transit which was swallowed up into a Durham Region-wide transit system a few years ago, conducted studies that indicated a large percentage of its ridership were students, either attending high school or college. If that is still the case, it’s a funny way to treat a majority of your customer base. Surely, leaving people waiting longer for buses, or squeezing them tightly together on fewer buses, doesn’t promote the use of public transit.

It would really be promoting quite the opposite, forcing people into their cars or finding an alternative means to get somewhere. Transit service shouldn’t get to the point where a senior citizen, with the help of Oshawa councillor Robert Lutczyk, who used to be on the transit commission, has to organize a 1,000-name petition to get more buses added during the day.

The councillor noted that the very bus route the citizen was concerned about for many years met all ridership criteria, based on the number of passengers that rode the buses.For more people to take public transit, the service needs to be there when they need it. Sure, some routes won’t make the grade on the number of passengers using those buses, and service will be curtailed. But properly servicing popular shopping areas and post-secondary schools should be a must.