By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Cowansville residents who enjoyed their experience with the city’s bus service over the past few months can keep on riding for at least another year.
With funding from the Quebec ministry of housing and municipal affairs, the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the municipality of Cowansville launched the city bus loop as a pilot project this past April. It was originally to have ended on Oct. 1. However, the MRC announced late last week that bus service would continue until at least Oct. 1, 2025.
“We now have the most optimal version of the service,” said Khalil El Fatmi, transport services coordinator at the MRC Brome-Missisquoi. “We ran several tests [over the past few months] to find the most appropriate formula that would be easy to put in place and would meet the mobility needs of citizens. We wanted to prolong the project for a year in order to measure how people are moving year round, and see how the weather and the school calendar affects the way people use the service.”
The MRC opted for a single bus line, running on a loop, approximately once an hour between 6:30 a.m. and 5:40 p.m, Monday through Friday. There are 24 stops on the current route, compared with 20 at the beginning of the pilot project. The loop begins at the bus shelter at the corner of Boul. Deragon and rue Spring and ends at the corner of rue des Pivoines and rue Brock; Massey-Vanier High School, the Campus Brome-Missisquoi vocational training centre, Davignon Park, the MRC office, Brome-Missisquoi–Perkins Hospital and several major stores are stops on the route. Tickets are $4 each, payable in cash only; riders can pay the driver on the bus or buy tickets in advance at the MRC office. There is no service on weekends.
“We had a taxibus service [in Cowansville] beforehand, but you had to reserve a day in advance to use that,” El Fatmi said. “The advantage of a regular bus service is that you don’t have to reserve – the user can just come to the stop at the given time and get on the bus.”
El Fatmi said a robust public transit system had the potential to encourage people to swap “l’auto solo” for other means of transportation. He said ridership data from the past six months is “very promising for long-term cultural change.”
“We are competing against cars, which have a lot of advantages. The more we invest in public transit, the more attractive we make it,” he said. “So that we can develop that culture [of using public transit], we need to scale up the frequency of bus service and do a lot of promotion. The weather will be an important variable, but we see that the enthusiasm is there, the need is there and people are getting on board.”
Over time, El Fatmi hopes the MRC will be able to roll out similar services in other municipalities, “depending on how negotiations go with participating cities.” He said the transit department has “a lot of projects in the planning phase which will be announced very soon.”