THUNDER BAY – Lakehead students are banding together to make sure their concerns are heard by city leadership.
Lakehead University students have started a petition that they hope will get the city to do something about what they feel are unacceptable conditions with public transit.
The list of complaints includes overcrowding on buses, not enough sheltered bus stops, and the lower frequency of buses that results in longer wait times.
As of Friday afternoon, nearly 600 people have signed the petition.
“This has become really severe," said Mohit Dudeja, president of the Lakehead University Graduate Student Association and advocacy coordinator for the Lakehead multicultural centre run by the student union.
"A lot of students are sharing their stories of falling sick because they had to wait at a bus stop with no shelter for hours,” he said.
“One primary thing is the frequency of buses has decreased a lot. There used to be a bus on route #2 every 15 minutes and now it's 25 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes and even that gets cancelled.”
Brad Loroff, the city's manager of transit services, said normally the city tries to ensure there are enough buses to service the high volume of passengers between the college and university, but the city was unable to this year due to a shortage of drivers.
“We have 17 vacant part-time positions that we’re trying to fill. That equates to about 38 per cent of what we’ve budgeted to have,” he said.
“The reason why that’s important is because of the implication that when those staff vacancies are there, it really impairs our ability to maintain those frequent bus service levels of 30 minutes or less. So, that’s resulted in unplanned cancellations at times.”
Loroff also added that it's simply not feasible to construct a shelter at each of the city’s 800 bus stops - but there are plans in place to soon add more to the existing roughly 118 sheltered stops.
"That's going to include installing 50 new shelters across the transit system and 20 of those locations will be at new locations where there weren't shelters before,” he said.
“The other 30 will be replacing shelters that are at the end of their capital life expectancy.”
One Lakehead student said she has often fallen victim to what students are calling “phantom buses,” where the transit tracking app, NextLift, reports that a bus is a few minutes away, but when the time reaches zero no bus appears and the timer restarts.
Loroff said the app will receive functionality upgrades next week and people should expect an end to the appearance of phantom buses.
Dudeja said the second biggest issue students have comes with overcrowding.
“There are also instances where there is a bus that's scheduled - it comes, but it doesn't stop at the bus stop because it's full so they mentioned that there is no service. This is causing big trouble with students trying to reach campus for their classes,” he said.
Loroff said overcrowding goes back to the issue of not having enough drivers and that when fully staffed, transit services usually have a second shadow bus following scheduled buses during peak times on major routes.
The petition can be found online here.
