Greater Victoria residents who use B.C. Transit’s accessible door-to-door service should find it easier to book rides come September.
Thanks to extra provincial funding of $300,000, the Victoria Regional Transit System will be able to provide 4,000 more handyDart hours a year, with the aim of reducing service denials and advance booking times, said B.C. Transportation Minister Todd Stone.
The handyDART service is for people, including seniors, with permanent or temporary disabilities that prevent them from using fixed-route transit. The driver picks the customer up at their home and takes them to their destination. Passengers must register with B.C. Transit and book their trips in advance.
About 120,000 handyDart hours of service are currently provided in Greater Victoria.
“These 4,000 new hours are really going to make a difference,” Stone said.
The additional hours translate to about 10,000 more one-way rides a year, or 190 per week, according to figures provided by Drew Snider of B.C. Transit. There are typically 600 to 700 unmet trips each month — largely due to short notice — except in December, when the number rises to 1,000. All told, there were about 390,000 handyDart trips taken last year.
“HandyDart works very hard to efficiently schedule shared ride trips that try to accommodate as many people as possible,” Snider said in an email.
The new hours will be added before and after peak usage times until B.C. Transit gets another HandyDart bus into service, Snider said.
What Transit does not know is whether people who may not have tried handyDart due to reports of service denials will now jump at the chance to access the service because more hours are available.
The 2016 provincial budget included an increase of $12.7 million over three years for B.C. Transit, bringing the three-year total to $324 million. Stone has said that enhancing handyDart to make the service as timely and as convenient as possible is “the No. 1 priority.”
“While we recognize that having to book two weeks in advance may work for regularly scheduled appointments, it doesn’t provide flexibility for folks to make plans with friends and family, and this is disappointing,” said Greater Victoria transit commissioner Susan Brice.
Ben Williams, president of Unifor Local 333, which represents about 90 handyDart drivers, said the increase in service hours is long overdue. “We’re just happy the transit commission has allocated those hours toward handyDart, and we’re hopeful that we can increase the hours on top of that to provide a better service for the residents in Greater Victoria.”
