By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Nine months after announcing that its on-demand shuttle service in Brome-Missisquoi was here to stay, Transdev has discontinued the service.
The Aug. 25 announcement came the same day the company launched a new bus loop serving Bromont, Cowansville, East Farnham, Granby and Saint-Alphonse on weekdays, in partnership with the MRCs of Haute-Yamaska and Brome-Missisquoi.
The BCN was unable to reach a Transdev representative for comment; however, Émile Cadieux, principal vice-president for Quebec and the Maritimes at Transdev, told La Voix de l’Est that low ridership prompted the decision to discontinue the shuttle service.
The service ran seven days a week and had stops in Cowansville, Dunham, Frelighsburg, Sutton, Brome Lake, Brigham, Ange-Gardien, Farnham, Bedford, Saint-Armand, Stanbridge East, Saint-Ignace-de-Stanbridge, Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge, Stanbridge Station, Sainte-Sabine, Pike River and Abercorn, as well as at the Autoparc 74 park-and-ride in Bromont where riders could catch onward Limocar buses to Sherbrooke or Montreal. Shuttles had to be reserved in advance via a call centre or an app – unlike the new bus loop, which operates on a fixed schedule. The shuttle service was rolled out as a free pilot project in June 2024. In December, the company announced plans to make the service permanent, at a cost of $15 per ride. That lasted just nine months. Cadieux argued that without government assistance and a significant increase in ridership, it was impossible to run the service profitably.
Sutton mayor Robert Benoit said he found out the service was being discontinued from a constituent, who got in touch with him after trying and failing to book a ride through the call centre. “I was very disappointed that the company didn’t let us know, especially since we have been in touch with them for the last two years [to try to make the service work]. They did everything they could to make sure it wouldn’t work.” Benoit, who occasionally used the shuttle service himself, said the service was regularly interrupted for lack of drivers, the initial price of $6 per ride had been raised to $15 without warning, and co-ordination between the shuttle service and onward Limocar service to Sherbrooke and Montreal was lacking, meaning riders sometimes waited an hour or more in Bromont. “It’s the same company [offering the shuttle and the intercity buses] – I don’t understand why it wasn’t better organized.” Despite its flaws, he said the end of the service was “really bad news for us.”
Benoit said the vast majority of people who used the service were from Sutton, and Sutton is not served by the new bus loop. Suttonites who don’t have access to a car and who want to travel within the region or catch an onward bus are now out of options – “unless you get a lift from your friend or a carpool from a Facebook group.”
Sylvie Berthiaume is a spokesperson for Solidarité Environnement Sutton (SES), a climate action group which has lobbied for better public transit to and from Sutton for several years, and a member of the Brome-Missisquoi sustainable mobility committee. She shared many of Benoit’s concerns about the quality and reliability of the shuttle service, and said she sympathized with Suttonites who lost a service they’d come to rely on. She called for a “paradigm shift” toward publicly funded mass transit in the region.
“Private bus transit has no future” in the region, according to Berthiaume. “To bet on that was a mistake. We need to seek out sustainable funding from the public sector. It’s a question of justice for students, seniors and low-wage workers to be able to get around, and the smaller municipalities have to be served. We have businesses that have recruitment issues because it’s hard to find housing and there’s no public transit [to bring workers in from surrounding municipalities].”
In the short term, she said she hoped the schedule and route of the new bus loop could be adjusted to better serve Sutton. In the medium term, she said the province could impose a licence plate tax to fund regional public transit. “It’s essential to have a bus service in the region. Now every household has to have two cars or more … having one car and accepting the tax is better than having two.”
Benoit said the municipality was “considering its options,” including appealing to the Quebec Transport Commission and the MRC and looking at other ways to bring transit back to Sutton. He didn’t think a publicly funded transit system, as proposed by SES, was feasible. “Tell me how much that will cost the municipality and where we’re going to get the money.”
No one from the MRC Brome-Missisquoi was immediately available for comment over the Labour Day holiday.