Bus ridership between downtown and Pine Centre not as high as expected — so where should the resources go instead?
Plus the school board chair pushes for 'parental rights,' and Shirley Bond on John Rustad
B.C. Transit has released its promised rider survey on changes to the transit system. I am a transit nerd — when I travel to other cities I prefer using bus/subway systems and have a collection of metro passes. I think a sign of a successful city is one you can get around without relying on private transportation so I’m always eager to see how we’re doing here. So here’s what the survey tells us:
People aren’t riding between downtown and Pine Centre as much as expected:
From the survey:
Route 105 was introduced in January of 2022 and provides limited-stop, express service between downtown and Pine Centre with major stops at Spruceland and CNC. However, ridership hasn't met expectations and we're looking to reallocate the resources dedicated to this route to better serve your needs.
There’s growing demand between Spruceland and College Heights:
The survey goes on to ask whether you support reallocating the buses currently serving this express route and reallocating the resources elsewhere. The options are:
1/11 Heritage
5/55 5th/Victoria
10 Downtown Spruceland
15 UNBC/Downtown
15 UNBC/Downtown and 16 UNBC/College Heights
46/47 Queensway
88/89 Westgate/Hart
There’s also a note saying: “Based on ridership trends, the most likely target for improvement would be routes 88 Westgate and 89 Hart, particularly between Spruceland and Westgate.” This kind of keeps with my theory that College Heights and Spruceland are increasingly becoming their own anchor neighbourhoods.
The Hart needs help
The next part of the survey is based around better service for the Hart:
One of the priorities of the 2020 Prince George Transit Future Action Plan was reimaging routes 88 Westgate and 89 Hart. This priority includes both changes to the routing and service frequency of these routes. We're looking to implement the first step of this priority in September 2024, which involves the routing changes and potentially some increase in service frequency.
Routes 88 Westgate and 89 Hart will be transformed into three new routes, 80 Hart/Spruceland, 81 Spruceland/Westgate, and 82 Westgate. This change is being done so that we can improve transit service in the busiest part of the route, the section between Spruceland and Westgate which will now be covered by route 81. Based on the availability of resources, this change could improve the service frequency along the route route 81 to up to 15 minutes through most of the peak hours (approximately 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.)
Then there are a few details and that’s it — the whole survey! If you are in any of these areas, and especially if you use the bus, you should fill it out.
The school board chair and ‘parental rights’
This might not get much attention under normal circumstances. But we are living at a time where there are weekly rallies, under the umbrella of parental rights, of protesting kids learning about pronouns and the existence of transgender people in schools (the rallies in support of these things, in Prince George, continue to be larger).
And the board chair just so happens to be planning to run in a provincial next year as a member of a party whose leader used his first opportunity to ask a question in the legislature to beat this same drum. With that in mind, the desire of that same school board chair to change district policy around classroom presentatoins takes on a different light — one that I’m sure looks different depending on which angle you are coming from.
And it’s interesting to see that it seems some new lines might be being drawn between Weber and the other board members — this time, only Corey Atrim supported her motion, with everyone else voting it down, with Erica McLean calling it “reactionary.” Again, I don’t want to overstate a sense of division here — as I wrote last time there was a board meeting, they are doing the work, and these sorts of conversations are just a portion of that. But, let’s turn to Weber herself to how she views this:
“We deserve to know if a presentation is coming in, whether or not we as parents are going to agree to have our child dropped off,” she continued. “We can’t sit back and let people do what they want and then come back to us and say ‘oh, I’m sorry, maybe I should have listened to you, but can you forgive me now?’ It doesn’t work that way.”
Weber finished by saying “This was a very lighthearted [policy], so just imagine the conversations that are going to take place later.”
The policy did not pass.
After the meeting, Weber told media she believes this policy will be brought forward again, “it is not done. It is not completed… maybe in a different format.”
“When it comes to presentations, it does families justice to have adequate time for planning around this,” she said. “We will keep pushing forward for parental rights.”
OK then.
Also at the school board: “Spruceland Elementary” is now "Spruceland Community School of the Arts” which I am sure will spark the same level of outrage as changing Kelly Road to Shas-Ti/Kelly Road.
And:
Shirley Bond on John Rustad
Speaking of the B.C. Conservatives, B.C. United MLA Shirley Bond was interviewed about her plans for the upcoming election on CBC. When asked her thoughts on her former party colleague, John Rustad, defecting to the B.C. Conservatives and taking a hard turn against several policies he once supported, including SOGI education, she had this to say:
“This is a person who sat at the cabinet table when many of the decisions which he is now being critical of were approved. He supported then, and suddenly he doesn’t.
I work to try and be respectful and, you know, often we’re on the same plane flying home and back. So I try to be respectful, but we should be clear here.”
Why doesn’t somebody DO something about downtown?
Another day, another letter to the editor saying mayor and council should do something about downtown. This is fine, but what does get a little tiresome is that none of these letters actually suggest what that something should be — raise taxes to hire more bylaw officers? Massively increase the budget to pay for city-funded social workers? Build a wall? Across the province you have mayors and councils of all sorts of different political stripes who would like to do something about their respective downtowns and it’s sort of darkly amusing to imagine that there’s actually a very simple solution with absolutely no downside and they are all just refusing to do it. Anyways, Darrin Rigo wrote about this in his newsletter and suggested that maybe this isn’t just a matter of “downtown”:
In no particular order: Inflation is at an all time high. Cost of living has risen at an unprecedented rate all around us. A housing crisis. We just exited a global pandemic that flipped lives upside down. A toxic drug supply. An opioid crisis. Reckoning with a complicated history of intergenerational trauma from residential school and attempted genocide. A VERY alarming uptick in rates of mental health crisis and feeling like there’s an imminent collapse of our healthcare system.
…
Why are the streets so wide and the sidewalks so narrow? Why is there no protected bike infrastructure? Why is there no affordable commercial office space but so many empty buildings? These are downtown problems.
Why do people sleep under tarps outside of the Regional District? Why do people use drugs to cope with pain and exhaustion and trauma? These are societal cracks that people have sadly fallen through.
Our nightclub era is over
This post on Reddit made me realize that the Prince George I grew up in/became a young adult in must sound wildly different from the one today. “Back in my day, we would go to the Cadillac and the Generator and sometimes head over to the Cowboy Ranch for karaoke…” Also, the Hell’s Angels seemed to come up in conversation a lot more….
Posts:
(I would die if I saw this)
Quick news:
Fall's cold arrival hasn't shaken off the impact of B.C.'s months-long drought.
“It’s pretty incredible.”: PG man elated after claiming Mega 50-50 jackpot.
Social workers raising money to build wooden shelters in Moccasin Flats (see post above, fundraising goal reached).
Carrier Sekani searching for Indigenous filmmakers for upcoming project.
See Draco the dragon constellation in the night sky at PG Observatory this Friday.
Today’s song:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Northern Capital News is a free, daily newsletter about life in Prince George. Please consider subscribing or, if you have, sharing with someone else.
Send feedback by replying to this email. Find me online at akurjata.ca.
The whiplash I felt reading today's newsletter that started with my favorite PG topic: increased transit options, to my least favorite: the fact that the school board chair continues to be antagonistic towards teachers and schools, and low key threatened fellow board members when her motion wasn't passed?