Thompson Bus plans post-Greyhound service

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This article was published 19/07/2018 (2308 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Thompson-based startup hopes to hit the road by Sept. 1 to fill the pending void left by Greyhound Canada.

Thompson Bus will begin operating routes from Thompson to Winnipeg in the fall, with hopes of expanding services to Flin Flon and The Pas, co-owner Jimmy Pelk said.

Pelk, Thompson’s Twin Motors car dealership general manager, is partnering with Siddharth Varma, another Twin Motors manager, on the new business venture.

“We need a service for our northern community, for our northern people, and we feel being from the north, for the north, that we can do that better than someone from down south or outside the province,” Pelk said Friday.

When his community heard about Greyhound’s exit strategy — abandoning its Western Canada routes except for Vancouver-Seattle by Oct. 31 — Pelk said they were devastated.

“There was a lot of fear and unrest and uncertainty, because other than your personal vehicle and one airline company… there’s no other way to get out of Thompson. As northerners, the service needs to be there, both for passengers and for freight,” Pelk said.

He and Varma plan to start with three to six buses of different sizes to fulfil passengers’ needs.

“It’s not going to fall short of the need and it’s not going to have any wasted space that’s not needed. With Greyhound running seven days a week on a 53-passenger bus every day, that was more than the need required, which turns into waste,” Pelk said.

Kasper Transportation of Thunder Bay, Ont., has also announced plans to expand west, including routes to Thompson, which is located almost eight hours north of Winnipeg by vehicle. Pelk encouraged the competition, noting it’s better for consumers and companies.

In an interview on Wednesday, Manitoba Infrastructure Minister Ron Schuler said five or six individuals or groups had approached him with ideas for new private transportation businesses.

Thompson Bus was not one of them, Pelk said.

Premier Brian Pallister also encouraged private-sector development in a conference call with reporters Friday.

“Just because Greyhound didn’t find (the routes) profitable, doesn’t mean someone else might not. And it’s incredible when you pull communities together, what solutions they can come up with as well,” Pallister said. “The private sector, also, is notorious for being able to find a way to make the service available to people, and also establish a reasonable return on it.”

Schuler has urged his counterparts in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario to band together and ask Ottawa to push Greyhound for a 60-day service extension, to allow more time for replacement options to step up.

At the annual premiers meeting in St. Andrews, N.B., this week, Pallister said he and his colleagues agreed the federal government ought to ask Greyhound for more time, which he called a “reasonable and logical accommodation… to get some real solutions for people who will be more affected than perhaps many Canadians understand.”

A Greyhound Canada spokesperson said late Thursday the company hadn’t been contacted by any level of government to discuss extending service beyond the original deadline.

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @_jessbu