Jess McDiarmid
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, November 7, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - A study on Yellowknife's transit routes is expected to be under way by the end of this month.

The study will examine bus routes, times and ridership and the feasibility of meeting those demands, said Wendy Alexander, municipal works engineer.

"It's going to be used to determine whether we need to make changes to our existing system," said Alexander.

The city is accepting proposals for the study and expects to have results in by February 2008.

A final report and implementation will follow.

The study was a recommendation of a $30,000 marketing analysis completed earlier this year, which stated that Yellowknife's transit system was "inadequate."

Problems included buses running off-schedule and drivers skipping stops.

The Yellowknife Transit System Marketing Strategy concluded that unless the system's problems were addressed, marketing would not increase ridership.

City Coun. Paul Falvo was in favour of the additional study.

"It's time to find out if it's working in the best possible way," he said. "I think there's more people taking transit but we want to make sure it's as easy as possible to use it. We want it to be a good experience for people, we want it to get people where they want to go."

A good transit system would save the city money by reducing the amount spent on roads, said Falvo.

He said no similar study has been done since he's been in office, though the city changed routes about a year ago.

"That was good but nothing can replace an outside look at it," said Falvo.

Contracting the study to an outside firm will prevent putting more onus on city engineers, who must already run the transit system.

"We'll hopefully be learning how to move people faster because right now the bus takes a kind of serpentine route, which is good for some people but for other people it's not," he said, adding that the city, which added express buses in September, has been very responsive to those concerns.