Winery shuttle seeks to safely move workers, students and visitors

By Luke Edwards

A lot of people visit Niagara wineries each year, but a group of transit experts believe there could be more, and it could be done more safely.

The Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) is pitching a trial for a wine shuttle service that would connect workers, students and visitors to several local wineries. With nearly everything in place, proponents are awaiting funding from a provincial transit innovation fund.

“We checked the boxes, we crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s. So now we’re just waiting for approval for the first tranche of money,” said Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO of CUTRIC.

CUTRIC has been around for several years, acting as a non-profit to undertake projects that could advance public transit services in Canada, and working to secure funding to help pay for those projects. Before the Niagara winery shuttle project, much of CUTRIC’s work focused on hardware and technical projects, like introducing electric or hydrogen powered buses.

The winery pilot, which Petrunic described as more of a social innovation project, is a first of its kind for CUTRIC. But despite being relatively new to this type of work, Petrunic is optimistic.

“We expect it will work. We think there is pent up demand,” she said.

“But as much as we can analyze the stats on ridership of the stations, ridership from local surveys and winery input, it’s still at the end of the day guesswork. It’s informed guesswork, but it’s truly guesswork until you start running it and see actually who gets on board and is willing to pay the fee.”

The project’s focus is threefold. For starters, Petrunic said there are likely a lot of people who would love to visit wineries in the region, but are unable to do so due to lack of mobility. GO Trains and the like only get people so far, and Niagara Regional Transit doesn’t offer stops at wineries. That leaves people in Niagara who don’t have their own car, or people outside Niagara who come in by GO Train, forced to call a taxi or ride share service. And depending on where they want to go, costs can quickly escalate.

Additionally, Petrunic suspects there’s a subset of people who are either avoiding visiting wineries because they don’t want to drive after a glass of wine, or people who are risking it by getting behind the wheel while inebriated.

A shuttle service could make the roads around wine country safer.

However, it’s not simply a tourism push. The idea for a shuttle service actually grew in large part thanks to Petrunic moving to Niagara and seeing what the lack of transit options for the region’s rural communities means for workers or potential workers. Transportation is limited for the region’s migrant workers or the local student population, and Petrunic said their research suggests many more students from Niagara College, Brock University or even McMaster would love a summer job at a winery if only they had a way to get there.

The trial would likely start with one route. Petrunic and her team have worked to model different route options, leaving from GO stations in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. It’s a balancing act of finding routes that hit as many wineries as possible without having the roundtrip exceed far beyond an hour, which Petrunic said is about the limit for people to use public transit.

Two proposed routes see buses head out from the St. Catharines station to make stops at several wineries in Lincoln, and a second would leave from Niagara Falls, hitting wineries in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Petrunic said they’ve got good buy-in from several wineries and organizations in the industry. Funding would need to come from the sector, from fares, and from government support.

They’ve sought out funding through a provincial transit fund, and are continuing to hope they’ll be able to secure funding that way.

“The idea of that program was to help support and subsidize demonstration or initial new transit projects that serve areas that are underserved, in particular, to advance tourism, the economy, and sustainability goals. So it was a perfect match,” Petrunic said.

Should they get the required funding and start the program, Petrunic said they’d run it for three years and collect data, tweaking or enhancing where needed. If it ends up being successful, she said there’s a future where the service expands beyond wineries to other agritourism offerings.

“Wineries are the proposed starting point for this public shuttle service due to their immediate stated need, and their evident alignment with provincial agricultural growth strategies in the region,” Petrunic said. “However, we will work to invite other agritourism businesses in the area to join the consortium effort moving forward…We truly believe a public mobility service catering to the agritourism industry across Niagara - one that is reasonably priced, low-cost and operates as a non-profit - is critically needed to ensure the agricultural industry of Ontario reaches its full commercial potential within the Canadian economic landscape.”

For more information on the proposed service, visit cutric-crituc.org.