04/10/2026
I've lived in Toronto, Kingston, Montréal, Sherbrooke, New York City, a small town near Brussels, Singapore, and I've traveled many other places. Almost everywhere, I have taken public transit. You can see the most diverse cross-section of people on the metro. But I never experienced the consistent unreliability of transit, and judgment for taking transit, until Thunder Bay.
This mindset permeates urban planning (as well as public responses to the offence of paid parking). And when most people drive, our leaders seem aloof to the deterioration of this vital aspect of daily life, which in and of itself says something distinct about our city. It’s not possible in Toronto or Montréal to not know anyone who commutes via public transit.
The anxiety of not being able to get to work, school, appointments, exams, the airport, or other commitments is brutal, and people have lost jobs because of Thunder Bay transit's failure to maintain adequate staff coverage. I have personally been late or missed a meeting, waited while 3 buses didn't come, watched the bus go by me to a different stop with no notice, and had to unexpectedly call a cab. All of these are worse in winter, with limited shelters and temperatures that make long waits outside unsafe. And people across the North go to jail because they lack meaningful transit to access court, particularly from reserves, or because they turn on their car when they’ve been drinking when there is no transit or affordable alternative.
Buses can be incorrectly labelled (with staff saying the sign can't be changed) causing people to miss their bus, maps on the website are years out of date, stops are taken out of use without a sign, and routes can be cancelled or diverted with no notice at the stop, on the website, or the app. Very often, the schedules don't align with Google maps, making it challenging to plan a route at all, especially with obsolete maps!
I became furious that people have to put up with this awful racism when they’re just trying to get to the hospital!
For all the foibles I’ve experienced (including where public transit was random vans with cardboard signs on the dash), I have never had to endure the stress and frustration of simply trying to navigate the city of Thunder Bay. It's completely unacceptable and it's time our leadership started taking it seriously.
