Winnipeg's top bureaucrat sorry for sudden transit bus shortage

Winnipeg's top bureaucrat is apologizing for a bus shortage that has forced Winnipeg Transit to scale back service on numerous routes, even during rush hour — a last-minute move that has angered many riders.

Chief administrative officer Doug McNeil issued the apology in response to the service changes, which were announced late Wednesday and are expected to remain at least until the end of this year.

• Winnipeg Transit riders, students angry with last-minute route changes

The bus shortage, which comes as tens of thousands of students head back to the city's universities, means Winnipeg Transit can't meet the demand required at peak service times.

"I would like to apologize to the Winnipeg Transit users and customers for the short notice of these service changes. As CAO, I would like to say that we could have managed this impact to the citizens and we should have communicated with our elected representatives and our citizens much better," McNeil said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

"Today I met with our transit department, who agreed that this should have and could have been brought to my direct attention much earlier so that I could have briefed the mayor and council and advise the public about the potential for service interruption that led into the busiest week of the transit schedule."

On Thursday, the service changes affected about 18 routes during the morning rush hour and 19 routes in the afternoon.

The city says a revised fall schedule will come into effect Friday at 4 a.m. CT and will remain in effect until December.

Riders are advised to check the Winnipeg Transit website, call TeleBUS or contact 311 the day they plan to take a bus for the latest information on routes.

No routes are being cancelled, and Handi-Transit won't be impacted by the service interruptions, officials said.

Last-minute announcement questioned

Winnipeg Transit director Dave Wardrop said the city had considered not saying anything about the changes but decided in favour of notifying the public.

"The option was to not issue any notice at all yesterday and then go with unplanned service changes, which would have been less desirable," he told reporters on Thursday.

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman also spoke publicly on Thursday and acknowledged the city's budget is strained.

He said what's happening at Winnipeg Transit is part of a "broken" funding model.

In the meantime, the mayor said, "The scheduling [of Winnipeg Transit buses] needs to be more realistic to the resources that we have."

He called the city's lack of revenue an "acute problem" that has to be dealt with by other levels of government.

"The way that the city is funded is antiquated and this issue, in the short term, we want to make sure the schedule is going to meet the resources we have, and that is being addressed," Bowman said. "The schedule will be more realistic tomorrow by 4 AM."

But Mynarski Coun. Ross Eadie took issue with the late notice of the changes. He said he can't believe Winnipeg Transit would not have known about the bus shortage earlier.

"They needed to know at least a month ahead of time that this was coming because you just can't change the schedules that easily," Eadie said.

"They had already scheduled all the drivers and everything, right? So you don't change it that easy. They know weeks ahead and boom, all of a sudden it's here."

Maintenance issues to blame

Wardrop explained that the problem stems from a bus maintenance backlog that is taking longer than expected to clear.

"We had a backlog of general maintenance repairs as well as an unexpected spike in maintenance demands on Tuesday, Sept. 8, and what this revealed is that our 2015 fall schedule was overly aggressive," he said.

"The spike in mechanical issues is largely linked to a problem in the emissions controls systems in some of the buses in the transit fleet," he added.

Wardrop later clarified what the mechanical issues are, saying that the catalytic converters (and their diesel equivalents) on the buses are clogging, which affects the operation of the engines.

Wardrop said Transit has struggled to deal with some of its maintenance issues. A labour dispute that started in April and ended in June also left many buses sidelined, he added.

Bus operators and maintenance staff refused to work voluntary overtime during the labour dispute, which left many buses running late or not at all due to mechanical issues.

But Wardrop would not point to the labour dispute as a cause of the current problem. Instead, he said the buses in Transit's fleet have sophisticated on board systems with complicated heating, cooling and emissions controls.

"[That] has increased the maintenance demands substantively," he told CBC News earlier Thursday.

When Transit's annual September increase in service kicked in "we realized that we were overly ambitious in terms of what we could put out there to meet demand on this," Wardrop added.

A press release sent out late Wednesday night said Winnipeg Transit — which handles about 130,000 riders each weekday — has the lowest number of spare buses of any large transit system in Canada, so maintenance issues like this have an immediate impact.

Winnipeg operates with 11 to 12 per cent extra buses on its service, whereas other jurisdictions average 20 per cent more, according to Wardrop.

'I see this getting worse'

John Callahan, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1505, said the problem is no surprise.

"I hate to say it, but I told them so," he said.

"We talked about this during our labour dispute, the shortage of buses, the shortage of manpower and not being competitive enough [in wages] to attract tradespeople and this is the end result.

"And I don't see a quick fix to this. I see this getting worse, much worse, especially as we get into the colder weather."

A big part of the problem with getting the buses fixed is that Transit is facing a shortage of experienced mechanics to do the job, Callahan said.

"We've got 86 mechanic positions. Right now almost 50 per cent of those are filled by apprentices," he said. "And we just lost two mechanics — two mechanics quit, they went elsewhere."

Transit has had a public posting for mechanics since March but has only hired one, said Callahan, who called on the city to do more to attract and keep mechanics through higher wages or a maintenance supplement.

"We're in a downward spiral. We need to get very aggressive right now in hiring," he said. "They need to up their allotment of mechanics and they have to be more competitive [in wages].

"Regina and Saskatoon … they're paying their mechanics $6 more an hour on top of their top rate as a market supplement because they know the demand is high for mechanics. This is something that I've talked with the city about.

"It's something to have to really look at in order to be competitive, in order to maintain the fleet and to keep the system running."