By Justine Kelsie

City bus pilot project proposed for new school in Arbour Hills

Apr 10, 2018 | 2:41 PM

The City of Grande Prairie is looking at trying out a two-month bus pilot project for the new school in the Arbour Hills neighbourhood.

St. John Paul II Junior-Senior Catholic High School is set to open at the end of April. During a meeting with the Transit Management team in early 2017, Grande Prairie Catholic School District (GPCSD) staff discussed the potential for having similar transit service that St. Joseph and Charles Spencer High Schools have. They also discussed their school being added to an existing route.

Assistant Transit Manager Steve Harvard says a full transit route isn’t warranted right now for the area north of 132 Avenue.

“Something that we look at is the number of residents who live within 400-metres of an area. We would want some inflow. Similarly, if we wanted to compare, for St. Joe’s and Charles Spencer there is a significant other rationale for transit service. There are businesses there, there are subdivisions there, and other trip generators like the Eastlink Centre.”

Harvard says there isn’t time available in the current system for a bus to stop.

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“Whenever you add an additional block or two, or in this case (it would be) six to eight blocks, and that is (added) time. When you start spending more time doing the route, the route that is timed for 30 minutes turns into 35 then 37 minutes. You then lose your schedule reliability.”

Funds are currently not available in the transit budget to include more stops on the schedule, according to the Request for Transit report provided to committee by Harvard. It would cost approximately $115,000 to implement.

City council will look at adding a two-month pilot project for a special service to drop off and pick up students from the new school. If approved at the April 23 Council Meeting, the bus would run in May and June. The GPCSD would cover the $14,000 cost. Transit Management and the School Board would reassess after the project is complete to decide what would be possible for the following school year.

Although the full service is out of the picture, Harvard says they continue to monitor areas that could use a new route.

“All of our requests for transit, we continually review them on an ongoing basis. There are specific ‘warrants’ for new service. In other words, there is a criterion that needs to be met in order to put those new services in.”