WATCH: Kelowna slow to get on the bus

Kelowna residents have been boarding public transit buses since 1977 and how things have changed.

“We’ve gone from roughly half-a-million rides a year to close to five million rides a year in the last 15 years,” says Ron Westlake, Manager of Transportation City of Kelowna.

And for the entire Central Okanagan, it’s nearly eight million. Pretty impressive numbers, but not when you consider that only four percent of the Central Okanagan’s population uses transit. When you break it down, it works out to roughly 7000 daily passengers out of a population of 188,000 — meaning more than 180,000 are not getting on board.

One way of measuring a city’s success with public transit is finding out how the labour force is getting to work. About three per-cent of workers in Kelowna take the bus. Ten years ago it was at two percent. Looking at other cities, nearly 10 per cent of Edmontonians rely on public transit to get to work. That number more than doubles in larger cities like Toronto and Montreal.

Central Okanagan Transit officials think they know why the numbers are so low. Time.

“It’s time. That’s what I’m thinking,” says Rafael Villarreal, Regional Planning Manager City of Kelowna. “If it takes you an hour to go from A to B, why are you going to do that, if you can drive in 20 minutes?”

But Kelowna mayor, Walter Gray, says times are changing.

“I remember 17 years ago when I was mayor, we would have people phoning angry that they see a bus go by their house every day and not one person on it. Well, those times have changed.”

But Gray points out that some refuse to change and that’s why he says Kelowna is one of the most autocentric communities in all of Canada.

“We cannot continue to be autocentric because the roads simply won’t be able to handle it and building more roads to store more cars is not the answer. Transit is the answer. Walking is the answer. Cycling is the answer. And that’s where our future is.”

It cost more than $21 million to run Kelowna Regional Transit per year. More than half of that is subsidized by taxpayers at the provincial and municipal level.

The biggest users of transit in the Central Okanagan are UBCO and Okanagan College students.