Guest Spot - Transit Moving to Rear-door boarding and Waiving Fare Collection

March 20, 2020 - BC Transit’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) has been meeting regularly and working to ensure we are taking appropriate actions to protect the health and safety of our operators, staff and our customers.

A key safety measure transit systems across North America can offer is to move to rear-door boarding on all buses that have them, and to cease revenue collection on all buses (including handyDART). This minimizes interactions between operators and customers and creates conditions that support social distancing. It is imperative that we provide a safe working environment for everyone especially our operators, especially as we continue to provide essential services to those who rely on them.

Over the past 48 hours, we have worked closely with many local government partners to secure approvals to make this change and in many of our systems this has been implemented or is already underway. These changes were implemented in Nanaimo and Victoria on March 19. It has since been implemented in other BC Transit systems and throughout the TransLink transit system in the Lower Mainland. In order to ensure a consistent approach across the province, this morning the BC Transit EOC has made the decision to mandate all remaining systems to move in this direction. Operational changes will occur no later than Saturday, March 21 and may be sooner, depending upon the ability to implement by our operating partners. This is in effect for conventional, community, and custom systems.

The decision to move in this direction has not been taken lightly, and we recognize this does not align with normal approval processes. In these extraordinary circumstances, we remain focused on the health and safety of our operators and customers, and we must all take action to protect them. In the coming weeks we will work closely with you to manage the implications of making this change.

We also recommend for the next week we maintain existing service levels and allow our operating companies to manage trips to meet resource availability. This will also support our provincial edict to maintain social distancing while ridership levels stabilize. We are going to be working closely with you to monitor ridership and stabilize service needs for the foreseeable future.