Next year, while I am attending the University of Victoria, I have a few options to get there from where I live in North Saanich. Relying solely on public transit would typically result in a travel time surpassing 90 minutes in each direction, involving a 25-minute walk, then three separate buses with transfers in between. Compare this to the 30-minute driving time, and the choice becomes clear. The numbers often simply don’t add up for public transit to be a viable option, particularly in rural communities.
Yet on paper, it holds many benefits. Its lower environmental impact is attractive to some youth, and most notably, is the lack of costs associated with buying, insuring, maintaining, filling up, and parking a car. Due to such costs, public transit becomes an issue of equality in providing better transportation to those from all income levels. As such, young people are often incentivized to utilize buses and other forms of mass transit, such as through the mandatory purchase of an annual bus pass when attending certain universities.
For this younger demographic, some of whom can’t yet obtain a driver’s licence or can’t afford the costs of car ownership, transit is particularly critical. But the lack of reach of public transportation on the Saanich Peninsula makes the aforementioned advantages difficult to harness. So how do we reap the benefits, and make public transit a more enticing option?
More frequent, further-reaching services would render public transit more convenient and efficient to use; dedicated bus lanes and other more public transit-focused infrastructure would cut travel times, potentially making buses quicker than driving once traffic is considered.
Ultimately, though, such improvements require significant upfront funding. There’s a sort of cycle here, where increased ridership would bring funds to improve transit, but the improvements need to be done in the first place to provoke an increase in ridership. Additionally, there is a limit to how frequent or varied routes can be in the more rural areas of the Peninsula, where the low population density doesn’t support very regular bus service.
Looking to the future, new technologies present creative solutions in bettering public transit, including driverless buses and artificial-intelligence powered route planning, ideas that could make transit more cost-effective to run in rural areas. Other cities have also utilized e-bikes that can be picked up and dropped off at different locations to help connect people to transit exchanges. For now, though, new investment is needed to render public transit a more viable option in rural areas, and provide more efficient, equal, and sustainable travel.
Kilian Jungen is a recent graduate of Stelly’s Secondary School.
