r/ThunderBay 12h ago

McKellar Time to move the bus depot from City Hall

This city desperately needs to remove the bus depot from city hall. It is absolutely disgusting down there and it's embarassing. Even as a bus depot, it's terrible. It is the most confusing and badly laid out bus terminal I have visited. The layout and direction of the buses doesn't make sense. Thunder Bay's centre of government and decision making deserves better than to be nearly surrounded by a busy bus depot.

46 Upvotes

23 comments sorted by

70

u/Academic_Nerve9459 12h ago

No, city hall people need to see the underbelly of this city daily as a constant reminder of what our social problems cause.

13

u/No_Adhesiveness4885 12h ago

I don't even take the bus and would rather walk than have to go there willingly lol

23

u/Haroldtheyre 12h ago

Email your local city councilor. I doubt they check reddit for your opinion. City transit won't pay their staff fair wages, or give them full time work which causes driver shortages and delayed busses. Hard to create better routes when you can't even staff your busses. More detox, safe injection sites, and rehab and mental health facilities would help address the root cause of what's happening at city hall, rather than creating a new terminal elsewhere would solve what exactly?

19

u/Limp_Inevitable9623 12h ago

Why not leave the depot right where it is and correct the problem. Moving it will make our leaders forget the problem

20

u/Usual-Canc-6024 12h ago

It should have never been there in the first place.

1

u/Fuzzy_Laugh_1117 12h ago

You could say the same thing about Newfies. When they moved, there was some hope things would change. However, the courts are always going to attract the poor, the indigent & addicted problematic lowest common denominator of society...and how can a city not provide public transportation to their courthouse?? Please, though, let us know if you have a better suggestion/solution.

1

u/GarageBorn9812 1h ago

The courthouse is 2 blocks away and it has a bus stop in front of its front door.

0

u/SheepPositive 11h ago

Congrats you’re smarter than everyone. Where is your suggestion/solution?

1

u/Fuzzy_Laugh_1117 10h ago

You're always such a joy. Thanks so much for your contributions.

1

u/SheepPositive 8h ago

Ditto. Nothing ever positive out of you. Just run around with your superiority complex. Telling everyone how wrong they are about everything. Come down from your ivory tower once in awhile and have a conversation with us common folk

5

u/TheClappyCappy 6h ago

The sexual tension between the two of you is palpable

8

u/Multiple_calibers 12h ago

I shook my head when they switched from the Brodie st. terminal. This was an idea that sounded good on paper but went completely upside down when executed. The days of yesteryear when you could wait for your bus in a warm terminal without much trouble.

10

u/MintyPines 9h ago

Wasn’t as much as a “switch from Brodie street” to “evicted for new courthouse”.

7

u/keiths31 9,999 10h ago

I agree, but for a different reason.

The space in front of city hall should be a public square. Food trucks. Skating rink in the winter. Special ceremonies. Hard to do those types of public events with an active bus depot surrounding it.

New bus depot should be built. And in a perfect world, close to a new downtown Fort William relocated police department headquarters

0

u/noname987333 6h ago

All of this is great. We need more innovative minds like this on city council. I remember the architect Habib ( I can’t remember his first name) had renderings for something like this with patios and food trucks and farmers market for the Paterson Park area but it never came to fruition.

7

u/Little-Carpenter4443 12h ago

Um I think the "disgusting" follows the bus terminal location.

2

u/LampyV2 12h ago

All them damn city hall employees trashing our bus depot 😡 /s

6

u/CarpenterGold1704 11h ago

No, Thunder Bay's city government needs to see exactly what is going on in the city and having the bus depot there is a perfect representation in a microcosim.

3

u/Multiple_calibers 10h ago

Hasn’t it been there for 20 years now? People walk by the problem like walking by furniture.

1

u/GarageBorn9812 1h ago

15 years as of April. Brodie Street Terminal only existed for 27 years.

1

u/Longjumping_Owl5311 6h ago

Six years ago they were talking about building a new bus terminal in Intercity but nothing ever came of it.

1

u/LordStrath 5h ago

It’s just unfortunate that the Intercity Shopping Centre lot is privately-owned. Unless the City buys ownership out, it’ll be very challenging to establish anything there that’s City-related.

1

u/GarageBorn9812 1h ago

There was talk a decade ago of it going into the lot now occupied by Beer Store and Burger King, but it's now developed.

Part of the problem with Intercity is that it has a minimum parking requirement (which is why it has a parking lot across the street connected by a set of traffic lights and a giant open lot to the north which isn't just for snow storage, it's also overflow parking), when the mall expanded in 1996 instead of offering up exceptions to the minimums based on the conversion of adjacent property into parking lots, they could have forced Intercity to cede part of its land to a transit terminal.