Saskatoon bus ridership and fare revenue posted big gains last year as a major transit upgrade looms, but issues with reliability and safety linger.
The Link rebrand for Saskatoon’s bus rapid transit style revamp creates pressure to provide good service and avoid having smart alecks like me precede it with the word “weak.”
But that represents a marginally better fate than prompting wiseacres to remark that the city’s bus rapid transit system fails to provide rapid transit.
But the rebrand comes at an opportune time when there’s actually some good news on the transit front in Saskatoon after a decade of detriment, starting with city hall management’s 2014 lockout of transit employees.
That labour dispute set back transit severely, with ridership only surpassing the numbers from 2013 — the last year prior to the lockout — in 2019, when the number of recorded rides hit 9.6 million.
The following year, unfortunately, that successful surge was shattered by the COVID-10 pandemic, which slashed ridership by more than half.
Last year, the number of recorded rides crept back up to 7.4 million, more than three-quarters of what it was prior to the pandemic.
This stands out as terrific news in Saskatoon at a time when public transportation suffered such steep declines worldwide during the pandemic that some were wondering about its future viability.
It’s impossible to know how much ridership increased last year compared to the previous year (2022) because the technology that counts riders was apparently not working reliably — yes, somehow that’s possible in our era of cellphones and other electronic advances.
But we do know it’s bounced back impressively from a low of 4.3 million rides in 2021.
Certainly, these numbers look less impressive in the context of a growing Saskatoon that surpassed 300,000 people last year by adding about 15,000 folks; that’s an entire new neighbourhood or equivalent to the whole population of the eighth largest city in Saskatchewan.
Even if Saskatoon reaches its pre-pandemic high for ridership, it will represent a smaller piece of the transportation pie in a more populous city.
Bus fare revenue skyrocketed to $13.5 million last year, which is a 26 per cent rise from 2022 and 97 per cent of the money collected from riders prior to the pandemic, according to Saskatoon Transit’s annual report.
No transit system pays for itself entirely, but the more people pay through fares, the less need there is for property tax to cover the costs. And the fact that people are willing to pay for transit shows rising faith in a system that can be compared aptly in recent years to a ride over a pothole-pocked street.
In addition to the lockout and pandemic, former transit director Jim McDonald bolted in 2022 amid an audit examining why buses had been unavailable due to maintenance issues the previous winter. The audit blamed management, but not McDonald specifically.
So while transit remains on a promising trajectory, people will need to know that the service is reliable, and also that riding the bus is safe.
Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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