FEDERAL cash renews hope For Downtown hub

With more than $300 million in transit infrastructure funding now on the table through a federalprovincial agreement, council is buzzing with ideas about how to improve bus service in Regina.

One priority: A transit hub for downtown.

Mayor Michael Fougere floated the idea during an interview with the Leader-post, saying it’s something the city is “going to be looking at.” He promised more news would follow soon.

The funding was announced early this month as part of an $896-million infrastructure deal, which includes a $307-million transit envelope for municipalities in Saskatchewan.

At least one councillor agrees that a transit hub should be at the top of Regina’s wish list for the funding. Coun. Mike O’donnell said it could take buses off busy streets and improve walkability downtown.

He said he visualizes it as a “large covered place” for passengers to keep out of the elements, pick up tickets and buy a coffee before heading to their next destination. He hopes it could ease congestion on 11th Avenue and make downtown “a more usable, friendly welcoming place.”

O’donnell said electric buses are also a priority down the road.

“I’d be excited for us to get into that world,” he said, adding that the downtown hub would be a natural place for recharge stations.

Fougere said the city’s funding submissions will depend on council as a whole. But he mentioned other transit infrastructure needs that could benefit from the new money.

“In general, it is to expand,” he said. “It is to buy new buses. It is to provide express routes, new technologies that will help us be more effective.”

The money is set to be spent over the next decade. But the $307 million earmarked for transit is at risk of being diverted elsewhere. Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale confirmed that the province will be able to shift money to other funding streams after three years, including toward rural and remote infrastructure.

Deputy premier Gord Wyant signalled that the province wanted that flexibility, saying cities would be unlikely to use the full transit envelope.

But Regina Transit has a long way to go in catching up to other Canadian transit systems. According to the Municipal Benchmarking Network, Regina had the third-lowest ridership per capita of 15 cities reporting data for 2016. Only the Ontario regions of York and Durham were worse. Both are essentially suburban areas.

Fougere said that stems from Regina’s “culture of cars.”

“We’re swimming upstream to some degree,” he said. “Changing people’s view of how they can move across the city — that takes time.”

He noted ridership has been on an upward trend for years, jumping from 5.5 million trips in 2011 to 6.6 million in 2017. But there was a reversal in 2015, when ridership dropped by 3.4 per cent and then flatlined before picking up last year. Fougere said the system is again on track for growth this year and next.

He connected some of the progress to recent investments, like low-platform buses, audible announcements and the Gps-enabled Transitlive system.

“We’ve crossed an important line for the city in how we view transit as being fundamental to transportation,” he said.

Going forward, Fougere said he sees a continued emphasis on express routes. That could involve more dedicated bus-only lanes, including in the city’s northwest.

Fougere said it’s difficult to predict how the transit system will evolve as Regina grows.

The city has a 25-year Transportation Master Plan to guide investment, but it doesn’t provide a list of specific projects. It does hint at the possibility of “higher-order transit,” suggesting that the city save land and plan ahead for the prospect.

That might conjure up images of a light-rail system, but Fougere cautioned that Regina would need to be far bigger and denser to make that kind of project viable.

“Whether we have a critical mass of population, whether we have a regional basis for that is something we’ll look at in the future — but that’s very futuristic,” he said.

But O’donnell suggested the future could be a lot like the past.

He recalled that Regina once had a streetcar system, and said it could make sense one day to restore a light-rail route along a corridor like Broad Street. He noted that Regina Transit has already had success building ridership along university-bound routes.

“Why not dream big?” he proposed.

Another far-reaching idea relies on the rail corridor that extends from the rail yard renewal lands all the way to northwest Regina. O’donnell said he once asked a rail executive whether the city could run its own trains along that route for mass transit.

“Absolutely,” he remembers hearing.

“He also finished by saying to me, ‘I don’t think you could afford it.’ ”