The Inter-Provincial Bus Situation

By Jim Derkson

(One of Canada’s best-known disability organization founders and activists, Winnipeg’s Jim Derksen considers the implications of the recent inter-provincial busing recommendations of the National Transportation Agency (NTA). See ABILITIES, Summer 1992 for a bus travel memoir from the 1950s by Jim’s younger brother, Tom Derksen.)

In his first bid for election our former prime minister, Brian Mulroney, promised COPOH that if the Conservatives were elected, the federal government would provide leadership and encourage the private sector bus operators to provide greater accessibility. In fact, through the ’80s and the early ’90s the federal government has financed the development of accessible bus technology and has engaged in a variety of meetings with the provincial regulatory authorities and the bus industry to encourage greater accessibility. The federal government has also offered to subsidize access retrofits on rolling stock. Unfortunately, the bus industry has, for the most part, boycotted this program. The accessible technology that has been developed with public funds is largely used to manufacture vehicles for export to the United States, where regulations already require accessible rolling stock.

When the NTA struck a subcommittee to address the issue, I hoped that this might finally bring it some profile. I was particularly encouraged by the naming of a politician with a reputation for toughness, Eric Neilson, to chair the subgroup to review this issue. When I went to Toronto to attend a press conference where the NTA’s Road to Accessibility: An Inquiry Into Canadian Motor Coach Services report was to be made public, I was hopeful. But as I began to look into the printed copy of the report, my emotions moved from delight and optimism to a sudden alertness and, finally, worry.

I was most impressed that the NTA was recommending the establishment of national standards that it would enforce. These would require bus operators to provide accessible equipment and to make their terminals accessible on a 12-year schedule that I thought was most reasonable and sensitive to the capital costs involved in retrofitting. I was also quite pleased to see that the NTA had costed the shift to accessibility and the increase of fare revenue was only about 1.5 per cent; a $10 ticket would cost about 15 cents more to the rider.

My alarm bells began to ring when I realized that the NTA was recommending federal subsidies to finance the capital cost implicated by national standards in the area of access to bus transportation. In fact, the whole process of regulating access was to be hostage to the federal government’s ability and willingness to pay the shot in regard to capital costs. I began to worry that the federal government might not agree to do this or might not continue for the whole 12-year schedule.

Then I thought: The federal government will come up with the funds all right -- and Via Rail, the airlines, perhaps even hotel chains, taxi companies and fast-food vendors will begin to think they need federal funding for their access-related capital costs.

I recalled that when ideas of gender equality gained official recognition, men-only bars, pubs and clubs were opened up to people of both sexes. But there was no outcry from these institutions calling on government to finance the extra cost of additional washroom facilities; it was not even discussed. Obviously, we all share responsibility not to discriminate either by personal action or by systemic design.

And of course, transportation includes a concept called cross subsidy. A very large person, because of his/her mass, requires more energy to transport than a very small person. But people are transported for the same price whether they are large or small, so you might say that the small person, in paying an average ticket cost, cross subsidizes a large person. The concept of cross subsidy underpins the requirement by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act Section 306 for large inter-city bus operators to provide wheelchair accessible buses beginning in 1996.

At the May 3 press conference in Toronto, I spoke in favour of the NTA report and its recommendations in general, but reserved COPOH’s position regarding the recommendation that the federal government finance capital cost of access in inter-city busing. In discussions with coalition members over the several weeks following the report’s release, I came more and more to the view that the recommendation for federal financing embodied a fatal flaw. In fact, it seemed to me that this recommendation was a way of placating the bus industry, providing a classic Canadian compromise to please everyone: the bus industry, the provinces (who would continue tariff regulations) and the disability community.

By May 27, when I was representing COPOH at a hearing of the Standing Committee on Human Rights and the Status of Disabled Persons on the general area of transportation, I was certain that this aspect of the NTA report needed to be challenged. My speech to the Parliamentary Committee is directly quoted in its report entitled Getting Back on the Road: Passenger Transportation and Persons with a Disability. In fact, the report accepted the notion that extra capital costs of providing wheelchair-accessible inter-city busing should be provided through cross subsidy rather than public subsidy.

I was also very pleased that the committee’s report endorses the establishment and enforcement of a national standard by the NTA regarding access to inter-city busing as well as the schedule for rolling stock access, motor coach terminal construction and retrofit. It goes further in requiring ambiguous terms of the NTA’s report to be clarified and in calling for an annual report from the NTA to the Ministers of Transport and those responsible for the status of persons with disabilities.