A Vernon resident will soon be pleading with city councillors to give his neighbourhood better bus service.

James Kanester, who lives in Okanagan Landing, has a Route 7 bus that goes right past his door but the wait is excrutiatingly long.

“Five years ago we had bus service here every 35 minutes,” Kanester said. “It got changed to every one hour and ten minutes.”

Even more frustrating for Kanester and his neighbours is that one block away, the more frequent Route 8 bus travels past on Bella Vista Road, but there is no bus stop. Residents in his area must walk 1.5 km in order to catch that bus and avoid walking on Bella Vista where vehicles have a tendency to travel well over the speed limit.

Kanester has repeatedly appealed to city staff, suggesting a plan that he said could be implemented at no additonal cost but would allow a better bus service. 

He said the Route 7 bus could be changed back to 35 minute service or the Route 8 bus could make a short detour off of Bella Vista, stopping at Heritage Drive and Allenby Way, and then return to its normal run.

He hasn't gotten anywhere and will now be appearing at council's Nov. 27th public meeting to ask for those changes.

“The city has not done its job in terms of looking at this route, which I sent it to them in February of 2017, and it has not been studied by BC Transit. I'm not sure why, they tell me it is an interesting route and they will consider it in the future.”

The City of Vernon and BC Transit are promising major changes to make the bus service better by next spring, but that doesn't include routes 7 and 8.

“At public outreach sessions held earlier this fall, BC Transit and the City of Vernon presented proposed changes to routes 2, 3, 7, 8 and a new route for implementation by March 2018,” said Ellen Morrison, a transportation engineer-in-training with the city. “Results from public outreach revealed that community members were concerned about the proposed changes to routes 7 and 8.”

Morrison said city staff are now recommending no changes to the two routes and that they could be “addressed as part of future transit expansions planned in the next two fiscal years.”

Kanester has been told by city staff there is low ridership on Route 7 so he tried an experiment.

“I tried to get from here to the college in an hour and a half, between 8:30 and 10 o'clock in the morning. I couldn't do it.”

A woman living nearby told him she couldn't take the bus to work in the morning because “she can't get a bus at 6:15 or 6:20 in the morning bcause number 8 goes right by and number 7 doesn't run until later.”

Now retired, Kanester has walked his neighbourhood, getting to know people in a number of complexes, including low cost housing, to see if people use or would use transit if the service was better.

“People that I went around and talked to at Kekani Estates and Bella Vista Villas told me 'there's no way you'll get anything done, they won't listen to you anyway'. I've sent a lot of emails both to councillors and to staff and I don't seem to have gotten very far. It wasn't referred to BC Transit in spite of my efforts in talking to transportation staff. I can't believe a simple little twist is going to take two more years to study before they can actually get it done.”

He is hoping the bus route becomes a priority item for council.