It was the once-a-year opportunity for residents to comment on the city budget, but some of the participants are feeling like they’re caught in the groundhog day movie repeating the same pleas with no obvious results. All fifteen spoke about transit, some about DARTS but most about the HSR, and they all want improvements, especially in funding.
Chair Tom Jackson enforced a strict five minute limit on speakers and pointedly noted who was “a regular” at such meetings as they came up to the podium. The majority of the citizen presenters spoke about the crisis in the HSR. None were asked any questions by councillors.
The co-chair of the Stinson Neighbourhood Association, Karl Andrus, contended that “the HSR isn’t just broken; it’s on life support by years and years of constant neglect” and he offered budget figures to prove it. In 1986, he noted, the inflation adjusted HSR budget was more than $50 million higher than last year and the system carried 31.5 million passengers a year compared to last year’s 21.4 million.
Andrus underlined those figures were despite considerable population growth in Hamilton over the last three decades. He also argued that Statistics Canada data disproves the HSR and council claims that transit ridership across the country is flat or declining. HSR ridership certainly has been, with declines in numbers of passengers in six of the past eight years.
The chair of the Hamilton chapter of the Council of Canadians, Dave Cherkewski, pointed to council’s refusal last year to keep its promise to put municipal dollars into the HSR after two years of steep fare increases. His brief remarks were bitter with frustration.
“I don’t want to be here,” he began. “I don’t want to speak to this issue, but for the fourth year in a row you’re going to hear from ten, fifteen, twenty of us on one particular issue – the HSR and it’s because for two decades there’s been a refusal by this council and previous councillors to put in municipal dollars.”
Lawyer Craig Burley also pointed to last year’s budget freeze on the promised HSR improvements of more buses, drivers and service hours. He linked it to the crisis that erupted in full view later in the year when “the city took a tremendous black eye” over hundreds of cancelled routes because of a shortage of drivers and buses. Burley also reminded councillors that the hit on the local economy from delay of the LRT means “$3 million a month, $36 million a year” of provincial dollars not spent in Hamilton, plus delayed development along with the impact on transit riders.
In recent weeks, the HSR has posted multiple colourful ads on buses praising its investments and how much it cares about riders. One speaker suggested that saying isn’t the same as doing. She’s been delegating for over a decade and contended that “if adequate money was budgeted and put into public transit ten years ago and even before than you wouldn’t have this many people here now describing the on-going issues that plague it.”
Another speaker offered multiple marketing ideas for the struggling transit agency but no HSR representative attended the meeting. HSR doesn’t try to attract riders by advertising its services.
A young professional who’s been riding the bus since she started university in 2012 and now is employed at McMaster described her frustrating experiences with trying to get to school and work by bus. She said a three kilometre trip from the east mountain to Limeridge Mall took 30 to 40 minutes, and to McMaster it occupied up to 90 minutes – considerably more than the hundreds of university students who travel by GO Transit from Oakville and Mississauga to the campus.
For the first time, this year the McMaster Student Union made a formal budget presentation to council. Stephanie Bertola noted that Mac students pay over 12 percent of the HSR fare revenue but were major victims of cancelled buses last fall.
Three days after the meeting, councillors approved the 2018 budget. It includes increases to the HSR that had been promised but not implemented last year, but no catch-up monies so the 10-year transit strategy appears to have become at least an eleven year one. A 10-cent fare increase for both HSR and DARTS will be imposed in September.