The Morinville Interlink transit bus won’t be around for much longer if town councillors get their way.
During budget talks last week Morinville, councillors told administration it was time to end transit service between the town and St. Albert after years of very low ridership.
The bus has been running to Morinville for several years as a commuter service, picking passengers up in several spots in the morning and then dropping them off at the St. Albert Centre transit exchange with a return trip at night.
Morinville Mayor Lloyd Bertschi said councillors want to support the service, but it doesn’t make sense if the community isn’t interested in using it. “At best I see three or four heads on it when I pass it on the highway,” he said. “This has been 10 years as a regularly scheduled service and we have not seen people taking it.”
Bertschi said the town has tried different routes, expanded service and better advertising but has never been able to expand ridership.
Allan Vendette was the bus’s lone rider on Monday night and said losing the service would force him to move away from Morinville sooner than he had planned.
“I will have to move to Edmonton,” he said. “I was going to be moving anyway, but now I don’t have a choice.”
Vendette said he understands the bus has low ridership, but for his own circumstances it is unfortunate council wants to pull the plug.
The bus is operated under a contract with St. Albert Transit with separate tickets available for purchase in Morinville. Council asked administration to end the service as soon as possible, but the current contract runs until 2011, so it could have another year on the road. The contract costs the town approximately $54,000 per year.
Bertschi said larger communities than Morinville including Leduc, Nisku, Spruce Grove and Stony Plain all have either only recently acquired bus service or don’t have it at all.
He said it was a forward thinking move for previous councils, but they simply can’t continue.
“There becomes a greater-good question and it is just hard to justify.”