Posted: Wednesday April 17, 2024
You may have noticed that we have been posting about a lot of transit updates lately. We know that having a reliable way to get around the city is an essential service that we provide, as is having a predicable schedule that you can rely on.
In order to be as transparent as possible, we want to provide you with an update so that you can better understand what is happening and when we anticipate being able to return to a more predicable schedule.
What has led us to this point?
- Anticipating the end of life of a couple of our buses, we ordered 2 new buses in early 2023
- These were set to arrive November 2023, however supply chain issues have delayed their arrival. The most recent Estimated Time of Arrival for these buses are:
- Bus 1: late April 2024 to early May 2024 (update: this bus has arrived and is being added to the service rotation)
- Bus 2: late June 2024 to early July 2024 (update: this bus has arrived and is being added to the service rotation)
- In 2023 we had to remove an existing bus (Bus #50316) from service due to a structural issue with the frame
- This has left us operating without any spare capacity until the first new bus arrives
- When a breakdown, repair, or inspection occurs, we don’t have a spare bus to bring into service, so we move to the modified two bus route system.
It’s likely that we will be operating the transit system without this spare capacity until sometime in May, which means that route modifications are likely to occur until May when we receive the first new bus.
What are we doing about it?
- As much as possible, we will complete minor repairs outside of service hours to not impact the transit service. Larger repairs and inspections need to be completed during regular working hours as they often require 2 technicians to complete
- We are working on a new maintenance schedule so that we can stack maintenance and inspections together as much as possible. This will lead to a transit service schedule that is more predictable, and were service outages and route modifications occur less frequently, but for a longer duration, and where we can announce the changes in advance.
- We will still be at the mercy of breakdowns or unexpected issues, but should help reduce last minute announcements about route changes and service outages.
How you can stay up to date:
- We will announce changes to transit services on our website (you can subscribe to this page to receive an email alert when we publish new content)
We thank everyone for their patience and understanding.