Expansions of a number of bus routes in the Cowichan Valley are being recommended by staff at the Cowichan Valley Regional District. Whether BC Transit will decide to fund many of them remains to be seen.
The last time the CVRD received any substantial provincial funding for expanding its conventional transit service within the Cowichan Valley was in 2018.
Jim Wakeham, the CVRD’s senior manager of facilities and transit community services department, told the CVRD’s committee of the whole at its meeting on July 24 that the district’s updated three-year transit plan includes expanding the Nanaimo-Cowichan Express (NCX) route in year one with additional Friday and Saturday trips, and it would have Sunday trips for the first time as well.
A press release from BC Transit on Aug. 19 stated that, effective as of Sept. 1, new trip times are being added to the NCX that will see two return trips added to Friday evenings and one return trip on Saturday morning with another return trip on Saturday evening.
A staff report said there’s also the possibility of a direct route on the NCX from Duncan to Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo in year two of the plan.
A Sunday service on the Cowichan Victoria Express (CVX) route is also proposed in year one, and new midday trips would be added to the CVX in year two of the plan. As for the conventional routes servicing the Cowichan Valley, plans include a new Saturday service for the Cowichan Lake Express (7X) and Route 5 (Eagle Heights), and an additional weekday trip would be added to Route 6 (Crofton/Chemainus) in year one.
These expansions were recommended by the CVRD last year, but were not approved by BC Transit due to lack of provincial funding.
Wakeham told the committee that the CVRD’s transit plans are conditional on the province providing funding for them.
“Unfortunately, that has been limited over the last couple of years but, fingers crossed, maybe our next ask will be a little more successful,” he said.
“We usually don’t find out until the end of February or early March as to what our success situation is.”
North Cowichan Mayor Rob Douglas asked Seth Wright, BC Transit's senior manager, government relations, who was also at the meeting how the region’s settlement patterns affects the province’s decisions regarding funding for transit.
Wright said the province’s transit plans for Cowichan are generally determined by land-use and population density at the time the plans are being made.
He said it’s a struggle to develop efficient transit services across the region to connect all the small and disparate communities in the Cowichan Valley that have low-density populations.
“There are some urban areas in the region, but this density does not create the context and environment that’s ideal for high-ridership transit,” Wright said. “While Cowichan didn’t benefit on the conventional transit side for the expansions you’ve been asking for for a number of years, the province did step up to the table in the 2024 budget and indicated interest in continuing to sustain growth in transit expansions, so perhaps there is hope on the horizon in that regard.”
