Costs curb Edmonton downtown-to-airport bus route proposal

A proposal to establish regular transit service between downtown and the Edmonton International Airport has been scrapped.

For now.

Edmonton City Council's executive committee on Wednesday decided not to move ahead with a shuttle-bus service between the city centre and the major flight hub 30 kilometres south of it due to costs, said Anne Stevenson, the councillor for Ward O-day'min and a member of the committee.

A motion to explore the possibility of adding the route was made "a number of months ago," Stevenson said, adding a report to the executive committee spelled out costs for a dedicated route: Between 13 and 18 new buses would cost between $10 million and $29 million, with an operations cost between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.

While the city has "a lot of capital priorities right now," including other pressing transit needs, Stevenson told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday she thinks there are "lots of options, opportunities to continue exploring that idea of finding ways where it could be feasible to deliver" a downtown-to-airport bus service.

"It (would provide) great connectivity for visitors coming to Edmonton and that can really help us attract things like conferences, different events, when organizers can see that there's that direct route," she said. "There's also a great opportunity for it to help decrease emissions. The vast majority of taxi rides from the airport are coming straight downtown, so (we could) potentially reduce the number of single occupancy vehicles going back and forth."

There's also local transit users' getting-to-work factor: 75 per cent of riders using Edmonton Transit's existing 747 bus route, which runs from the Century Park LRT stop to the airport, are people employed at the airport or in the surrounding area.

"It really just comes down to prioritization," Stevenson said.

"We learned last year that we've got a pretty significant deficit in our transit hours. Compared to how the population has grown, we're at I think about 250,000 annual service hours that we're short of. At our last budget deliberations in December, we did buy 20 new buses, we provided funding to provide 176,000 new service hours, but we're still short."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Marek Tkach