By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Farnham residents who don’t have easy access to a car will be able to get around town using a taxi-on-demand service starting this spring, Mayor Patrick Melchior told the BCN.
Starting in early March, if all goes according to plan, residents will be able to call a single phone number at least 30 minutes before a planned trip and get a taxi to pick them up at any one of 40 stops around town. Teens and adults will pay a cash fare of $4 each way or use tickets bought in advance at the town hall; children 13 and under ride free with a paying adult. The service will be available from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Although the exact locations of stops are yet to be determined, Melchior’s goal is that riders won’t have to walk further than 150 metres to reach a stop.
“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a number of years, and it’s something people want,” said the mayor. “People are coming here from the city, and our population is growing; there were 8,300 of us when I first took office [in 2018] and now there are 11,200. I think it’s important – for example, if you’re a single parent who doesn’t have a car and you need to go do your shopping, you’re going to be able to do it for eight dollars.”
The taxi service is a one-year pilot project being put in place in partnership with the MRC Brome-Missisquoi. The full budget has yet to be released as of this writing; Farnham councillors voted to approve $50,000 in municipal funding for the project. The MRC will contribute to the project through the Laboratoire d’innovation en mobilité intelligente territoriale (LI-MIT; smart territorial mobility innovation lab) initiative.
Farnham is the third municipality in the MRC to launch a taxi-on-demand program. The city of Cowansville has had a similar program for several years. Late last month, Bromont announced plans to launch its own project; Mayor Louis Villeneuve previously told the BCN he hoped the first on-demand taxis in Bromont would be in service by late February or early March.
“The [taxi-on-demand] program seems to work well in Cowansville. They’ve had it for a few years and their population was 12,000 when they started theirs; we have a population of over 11,000 now. We’re inspired by them,” Melchior said. He said other transit projects, such as a shuttle bus service, were “not out of the question” if data from the taxi pilot project showed they might be in demand. “We want to see the demand for this [taxi pilot project] first.”
Melchior said he hopes to arrive at a point where it’s possible to live a full life without a car in Brome-Missisquoi. “One of my dreams is to have a [taxi-on-demand] circuit that covers the whole of Brome-Missisquoi, and I don’t think I’m the only person with that dream – we’re working on it.”