More buses coming to Fraser Valley route as site bought for new Chilliwack storage yard

The Fraser Valley Express—the valley’s all-too-popular regional bus route—will likely start making even more trips come 2025.

BC Transit says money is now available to add yet more bus trips to the route in January, 2025, just three months after the route was last upsized. BC Transit also confirmed it has bought a new property in Chilliwack to service and store buses. The facility won’t be fully operational for four years, but will address one barrier to expanding the service.

More people, more buses

The Fraser Valley Express, which runs between Lougheed SkyTrain Station and downtown Chilliwack, just got more buses last month. BC Transit added 2,900 hours of service—the equivalent of two more buses making the trip every weekday—to the route. That service increase had originally been slated to beginning in January, but was expedited to address constant crowding on the route. That improvement follows an ‘emergency fix’ implemented last y ear to address severe overcrowding.

The express bus has been too popular for its own good for years, with ridership taking off after it was extended to connect with Lougheed SkyTrain Station in 2022. During peak times in 2023, buses from Chilliwack could be packed full by the time they arrived at Abbotsford or Langley stations, leaving some passengers waiting an hour for the next bus.

The extra trips added this fall might not be enough to meet demand. While the September expansion “has improved the situation somewhat,” challenges with the busy route persist, according to a report from FVRD staff.

Now, BC Transit is planning to add another two buses in January to hopefully further address the crowding.

Another 2,100 hours (about 70 percent of the earlier increase) will allow for more trips during peak times, particularly in the early morning hours where the service is starting to see more and more passengers embarking from Abbotsford stops.

Some of the new trips will run only between Abbotsford and Lougheed. It is hoped that those buses will help passengers who might otherwise be stranded when the bus they are waiting for shows up already filled to capacity. One-third of the new trips, however, don’t carry passengers and instead move buses back and forth between Abbotsford, where they are stored overnight, and Chilliwack, where the existing bus depot is too full to park them.

BC Transit is also planning to build a new bus depot on Progress Way in Chilliwack in order to increase the city’s capacity for public transit. The transit agency bought a seven-acre site for the new depot late last year. A new facility is hoped to be fully operational by 2028. But the site can be used to store buses even sooner, before construction on the rest of the facility is completed. More parking space, FVRD staff say, will help the FVX reduce the extra trips between their current storage site in Abbotsford and the route’s first stop in Chilliwack. The cost of the purchase was not revealed, but the site was assessed at more than $17 million last year.

While the expansion this September cost local governments $220,000, the proposed additional hours for January would total $120,000.

While the FVRD’s corporate services committee has endorsed the project, the FVRD as a whole—which has regularly called for more funding for the service—must still approve the increase. It will meet and review the proposal on Thursday. If approved, the route would include 21 full-length trips a day and eight trips between Abbotsford and Lougheed.