What does a person do when they have to go out of town for a medical appointment?
That is the question Town of Barrhead councillors are going to ask Alberta’s Municipal Affairs minister Kaycee Madu as well as other neighbouring municipalities to help come up with an answer.
Hopefully they can come up with a solution, but unfortunately, we do not have a lot of confidence that they will.
When it comes down to it we don’t believe there is the will from the public or government.
This issue isn’t new. It has plagued the community ever since Greyhound cancelled its Barrhead-Edmonton route in 2011.
In Alberta, from our understanding, there are relatively few rural communities with transportation services that go outside the community.
Or at least that is what we first thought. By paging through province’s Alberta Inter-Community Public Transportation Guide it listed several rural communities with transit services, that travelled within and outside their communities.
Unfortunately, details are scant. For instance, for Woodlands County and Mayerthorpe (Lac Ste. Anne County), we believe it is referring to the West/East End Bus programs which provide senior citizens with the chance to go on select entertainment trips. Last year Barrhead had a similar service through FCSS.
Although we appreciate that these programs serve a purpose they do little to solve the transportation issues of residents who do not drive.
So that brings us back to our original premise that the majority of rural communities do not have the resources to or more accurately the will to create a local or regional transit service.
Why? Because they are expensive and unlike B.C. where the province picks up 40 per cent of the costs of public transit, Alberta municipalities are left to fend for themselves.
That means unless a service club steps in with funding or a municipality can partner with one or more neighbouring communities basically they are out of luck.
As you read in our cover story, the Town of Barrhead intends to reach out to its neighbours to find out what the appetite is for such a joint service. And while we are confident they will agree such a service is much needed, we don’t like their chances. Woodlands County recently announced that due to a loss of $9.5 million in tax revenue in 2018 and 2019, and have halted all non-essential spending. Nor do we think it is very likely that the County of Barrhead would be willing to contribute, as they have a long-standing unofficial policy that programs should be user-pay and as we all know transit is never a break-even proposition.
That leaves the provincial government — and so far we see no indication that the newly elected UCP government has made no indications of being willing to whelp fund rural public transportation.
