By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
An ambitious public transportation project in Bromont has been quietly shelved after three calls for tenders failed to give rise to any workable bids.
After a pilot project in summer 2021 showed encouraging ridership results for a shuttle service within the city, plans were announced to expand the shuttle service as early as 2022, implement a taxi-on-demand service similar to the one in Cowansville, work with major employers and surrounding municipalities to set up transport for employees, and set up a municipal car-sharing system that would allow people to loan their cars to their neighbours.
At the time, the then-head of the city’s sustainable mobility committee, Pierre Vinet, said transit advocates hoped to “develop a package that will allow people to get rid of their second car, if they have one” by 2024.
Vinet and MRC Brome-Missisquoi (MRCBM) director general Mélanie Thibault confirmed that the project as it was originally conceived is off the table.
“We made three calls for tenders, and sometimes we had no bidders and sometimes the estimated costs were so high that we couldn’t move forward,” Thibault said. “One of the impacts of the pandemic and of everything that was happening with the world economy meant that costs exploded.”
Amélie Casaubon, communications and citizen services co-ordinator at the Ville de Bromont, told the BCN the city was “working on a sustainable mobility plan, but it’s still at a very early stage.”
Service not resumed in Sutton
In Sutton, an environmentalist group held an Earth Day rally to call for the return of inter-city bus service to the city. Transdev, the company which provided the service, never brought it back after the pandemic. Solidarité Environnement Sutton spokesperson Sylvie Berthiaume said the organization was asking for an on-demand taxi service between Sutton and Bromont, where people would be able to use an existing private bus service to go on to Montreal or Sherbrooke. There is an on-demand taxi service, but Berthiaume said reservations need to be made far in advance, “which isn’t going to inspire anyone to get rid of their car.”
“We feel that this bus service needs to be public, because it’s not profitable enough for a private company and we pay a lot [in taxes] to maintain the roads,” she said. “There are more and more people in this region, and new companies opening, bringing more and more workers who are not all living in town. If we don’t do something soon, there will be even more cars on the road and that will create extra pollution,” she said. “We need to think in the medium term.”
Berthiaume called on the MRC to appoint a sustainable mobility point person and invest in wider, safer bike paths as well as scaling up public transit. She and her colleagues say a lack of alternatives to driving makes it harder for senior citizens, young people, low-wage workers and people sharing a car with others in the same household to get around.
Thibault said it was “possible” that details would be released in the near future about a public transit project serving Sutton, but couldn’t provide further details.
A constant challenge
Thibault explained that the MRC works with municipalities on the development, funding and coordination of calls for tenders for city transit projects. Most recently, earlier this month, it launched a weekday city bus pilot project in Cowansville in collaboration with the city and the ministry of municipal affairs.
“We have six service hubs in the MRC and a lot of rural areas and small communities, so it’s very complex and it’s hard to put an efficient [public transportation] project in place,” Thibault said. “There are certain municipalities, like Cowansville, where it’s possible to live without a car, but it’s complicated. We do have weekday on-demand bus service, but it’s not adapted to everyone’s schedule.”
“It’s very hard to live without a car in Sutton, or even in Cowansville,” Berthiaume countered. “I met a couple who was trying to function without a car in Cowansville and they just couldn’t – they had to give in. We aren’t expecting service every 10 minutes, but it has to be better than what we have now. We’re in a climate emergency and we can’t wait 10 years.”