Transit ridership falls over last 2 years in Halifax

HALIFAX – Halifax Transit is becoming less popular for commuters who travel around Halifax and the immediate surrounding area, according to a report released on Thursday.

The report was done by Halifax Transit and looked at the amount of people who took either Halifax buses or harbour ferries over the past two years.

“For the end of year what we saw was the ridership was actually down slightly, by about 300,000 passengers for the entire year,” said Halifax Transit Manager of Planning and Scheduling Dage Reage.

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Reage said they are not surprised by the slight decline in use. He cited this year’s harsh winter as a deterrent for many from using buses. There was also a new holiday added in February, and a recent fee increase that have also contributed to the decline.

READ MORE: Halifax Transit’s service adjustments go into effect in February 

Some riders say that unreliability is a major factor, however, and that there’s more that could be done to make riding the bus a bit easier.

“I think more liability, if they use GPS tracking, something like that, almost like you can use with UBER, like you can see the cars, you can see the buses, that’d be awesome,” said one rider.

“I don’t have any concrete ideas as to how they can improve, I think someone’s bound to and the more that you ask and talk about it the better,” said another.

Halifax Transit is making some changes to improve routes and reliability for customers. Over the next few years they aim to streamline routes, officials hope to implement new technologies and improve accessibility for the buses and ferries.

But some, like Dr. Ahsan Habib, think that their planning needs to look further ahead. He said that for transit to be quicker and more reliable, like people want, the system needs to become a bigger part of every day transportation.

“Unless we really start to looking at not simply operational improvement, but on a long term basis, how can we give transit a priority on the road space?” said Habib.

“Unless we embrace transit as our culture of moving one place to another, it will be really hard to like attract ridership.”