Last week, a letter was sent to the Village of Pemberton’s (VOP) mayor and council requesting changes to the Village’s current transit system.
The letter referred to the number of students from Pemberton who travel to Whistler for school and how the current bus schedule makes things difficult for them and their parents to coordinate the daily commute.
“The Pemberton community is growing, and many children attend schools in Whistler, having us commute back and forth daily,” read the letter. “As my family is very conscious about the environment, we would love to lower our carbon footprint, but this is simply not possible as I have to drive in and out on a daily basis. Please consider adding a bus that arrives [in time] for school start in Whistler and leaves at [the] end of school day.”
While mayor and council agree on the environmental benefits of getting more cars off the road with increased transit, the question was brought up at the Dec. 7 council meeting by Councillor Ryan Zant, who wondered whether getting Pemberton students to school in Whistler is the responsibility of the VOP—something Mayor Mike Richman thought was a valid question.
“I’m sure people have a number of reasons as to why they send their kids to Whistler,” said Richman. “But we have schools here in our community with bus systems to them. If you choose to send your kid somewhere else, that’s totally fine. But the expectation that we’ll change the bus schedule around, I wonder if that’s appropriate as well, especially since our morning buses are really full.
“So are we looking at changing the schedule to bump people going to work, potentially, for kids to go to school? I think those are really good questions.”
However, not all councillors held the same view. Couns. Amica Antonelli and Leah Noble both thought that while they weren’t sure if it was the responsibility of the VOP to pay for a bus so people can send their kids to school in Whistler, there are many valid reasons that people do, so it would be worth inquiring about the schedule with BC Transit.
In the end, mayor and council moved to continue the discussion and send an email to BC Transit to request a schedule review of Pemberton’s current transit system.
Even before the issue about a bus that catered to school kids was brought up, Pemberton’s transit service has been a constant topic of conversation between mayor and council as well as among community members.
On Dec. 10, Pemberton local Lincoln McCardle posted on the Pemberton Community Forum Facebook page to gauge interest in sending a letter to BC Transit about adding two extra bus times to the current schedule due to the large gap between the times buses travel between Pemberton and Whistler.
Currently, the bus schedule has just two round trips that connect Whistler and Pemberton each morning between 6 and 9 a.m., then nothing else until after 4 p.m. when there is three more round trips between the towns, causing people who caught a morning bus from Pemberton to Whistler to have to wait for hours to catch the 4:40 p.m. bus back, often having to stand the whole time because the bus is packed full.
“Well right now for example, I had to do my orientation day today to volunteer for my ski pass and I’m done at 12 o’clock, and now I have to just sit in Whistler for the next four hours and just play the waiting game,” said McCardle. “That means I have to go to different places and spend money instead of just going home … because there is no middle of the day bus. On average in a week, I probably spend 10 hours in Whistler just waiting for a bus, and that adds up quick.”
McCardle would like to see a bus route connect the two towns at around mid-day and another at midnight, as this would allow people to not only get home to Pemberton at a reasonable time without waiting for hours during the day, but also give them the option to pick up a second job at night in Whistler or just enjoy a night out without having to pay for a pricey cab back to Pemberton.
Richman is well aware of the issues surrounding the current system, and said the VOP would welcome adding more routes to the schedule—but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Transit is one of the most expensive budget items for a community and there is “only so much we could put on the backs of our taxpayers,” Richman said.
“There are so many positive impacts from a good transit system. We get cars off the road, and just the ability to get people from the furthest parts of our community and our valley into town … where they can access work opportunities, services, and recreational opportunities and on and on, there’s just so many positive impacts,” he added.
“So we recognize there’s demand, and we want to increase the service. There’s no way we can align with everything, but we’ll do our best with what we’ve got to serve the people as well as we can. But like I said, it’s not without its costs.”
In the short term, Richman hopes the VOP’s schedule review request with BC Transit can open some possibilities to tweak the current system to provide more options in line with what community members are looking for.
A transit study was recently done for the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District’s Area C to see how transit could better serve the area’s people, and Richman hopes that this study leads to not only a more comprehensive transit system for everyone in the Pemberton Valley to get where they need to go, but also more opportunities for funding so transit times can be increased.
