NDP announces funding for rural bus pilot project

EDMONTON Thursday’s provincial budget will include funding for a rural bus project to connect small towns and municipalities with medium-sized cities.

Transportation Minister Brian Mason announced the pilot at Wednesday’s Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties spring convention in Edmonton.

He was mum on a dollar figure attached to the project, saying more details will be included in Budget 2018.

The plan makes good on part of the NDP’s 2015 election platform to reinstate more bus services to rural communities.

Mason told Postmedia the project came from a dearth in transport options after Greyhound cancelled a number of regional routes, leaving rural Albertans without options.

The government first looked at subsiding the cancelled routes, but with ridership on some buses hovering at just three or four people each day, Mason said it wasn’t practical.

After a year and a half of consulting with rural municipalities, the government settled on the pilot project.

Mason said the government will take a regional approach.

The project will help connect medium-sized cities such as Lethbridge, Camrose, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, Red Deer and Athabasca with surrounding rural and smaller urban municipalities so people have more options to get to medical appointments, go shopping and visit family and friends.

The intention is for the pilot to meld with co-operative work already been done between different municipalities, Mason said.

“This will supplement and support that work so that people can make better connections, for example from Sylvan Lake into Red Deer,” he said.

“We’re not being prescriptive about how to do it. We’ll wait to see what the municipalities come up with, and we’ll let them work with their existing services.”

Municipalities will have until the end of March to submit their proposals to government, with successful projects likely announced at the end of April.