By Pepper Parr
September 30th, 2019
BURLINGTON, ON
It was the Mayor’s initiative from the get go.
She is going to ride this one and reap the benefits.
Meed Ward was a big fan of getting people out of their cars and on public transit.
She was behind the free ride for seniors that is now in pilot and reported to be doing very well.
She next moved onto getting high school students on to public transit.
Her goal is to have anyone who has somewhere to go to do so by just hoping on the bus – free for everyone, eventually.
Meed Ward took it one step further – she thinks transit should be a Regional government issue so that there is easy travel to Oakville, Milton and even Halton Hills where there is currently no public transit.
Public perception was very poor in 2018
It improved in 2019.
Then it becomes totally free?
The instruction that came out of the city council meeting last week were crystal:
Direct the Mayor and Director of Transit to develop a draft report including a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) regarding free transit for Burlington students, outlining the program, costs, revenue impacts, eligibility, and commitments in more detail, in partnership with Halton Region and the four school boards that serve Halton students: Halton District School Board, Halton Catholic District School Board, and the two French school boards, Conseil scolaire Viamonde and Conseil scolaire catholique MonAvenir, and report back to council for a decision.
Mayor Meed Ward is going to be at the table where this happens – bet on it.
This initiative is going to be led by Burlington Transit with the different Boards of Education picking up the tab – they can certainly expect to pay more than they are paying now.
The Halton District School Board fell in love with the idea and had their motion passed before the city had their’s cast in stone.
HDSB Director of Education Stuart Miller when asked how this was going to work out said:
“It’s a little complicated.
“We do need the Catholic Board to agree and the transportation consortium as well. That hasn’t been done yet, but I suspect it is just the timing and it will as soon as the Boards can all meet.
“As for the work, most of it will be done by the City of Burlington with us helping to educate our students. The budgetary component will also be largely Burlington. We will continue to contribute the amount we have been providing, but this is pretty straight forward.”
Let us hope so.
Director of Transit Sue Connors, who did some exceptionally good work with the Brampton Transit system when she ran that operation, can be expected to do the same thing here. She is looking forward to being the first city in the province that has electric buses.
Does anyone have an idea when Burlington will get its electric buses, and how many will be purchased?