Officials 'disappointed' after Highway 7 bus route rejected by province

A long-awaited bus route along Highway 7 won’t happen for at least another year.

The route, which would take passengers between Agassiz and Mission, didn’t receive provincial funding for 2026, a new report to local politicians reveals.

Other transit projects in the Fraser Valley, however, had better luck.

Local politicians and residents have been calling for a bus route on the highway north of the Fraser River linking Agassiz and Mission since 2012. Planning began in 2018, but the project ground to a halt during the COVID pandemic.

The route would run along Highway 7 and, in addition to Agassiz and Mission, would serve an array of rural communities and First Nations. While Agassiz is currently served by BC Transit routes that connect it with Harrison Hot Springs and Chilliwack. But there is no bus that runs along Highway 7 and connects its rural and First Nations communities to larger population centres. In addition to linking Deroche, Dewdney, Lake Errock and Leq'á:mel, Sq'ewlets and Sts'ailes First Nations with Mission and Agassiz, a bus along Highway 7 could enable residents in those communities to travel into Vancouver on the West Coast Express.

The FVRD asked the province to fund the north Fraser route in next year’s transit plan, for implementation beginning next January, but the request has been rejected. The province said that “unprecedented” levels of requests from municipalities throughout the province made competition very steep for funding.

District of Kent Mayor Sylvia Pranger said the decision will have an adverse effect on the communities along the route, including both First Nations along the highway and residents in Agassiz.

“It’s something that we've been hoping and working for for some time, so it does affect us in a very negative way,” she told The Current Wednesday.

The route will be proposed again next year, FVRD staff wrote. Staff noted that the provincial decision was “disappointing” but that an extra year will allow more time for public engagement and planning with the Ministry of Transportation. Additional elements—things like bus pullouts along Highway 7, for example—could be planned over the extra months.

Pranger doesn’t think the rejection is the end of the road for the project, either.

“I'm very hopeful, and I think we'll be lobbying the province and writing letters to the province and BC Transit to see if this can be made a priority in the upcoming years,” she said.

The FVRD’s manager of strategic planning, Alison Stewart, wrote that several factors go into deciding what projects receive funding, including ridership productivity, critical issues, and functional capacity.

“The approved expansion requests are typically those that have a high potential for ridership growth, and/or are addressing acute operational challenges that can only be solved with an investment of service hours/vehicles,” Stewart wrote to the FVRD.

BC Transit says it is planning to address some of those acute operational challenges in the Fraser Valley this winter.

The FVRD also asked the Ministry of Transportation to further invest in more buses and more service hours for the Fraser Valley Express, a mega-popular bus route that runs straight down Highway 1 from Chilliwack to the SkyTrain.

Since its extension to the Lougheed SkyTrain Station in 2022, the route has been plagued with problems linked to its own popularity. Buses can fill up at Chilliwack and Abbotsford stops and eventually must pass up passengers, who must then wait for the next bus—sometimes for an hour or more.

BC Transit has committed to funding three more buses and several more trips a day on both weekdays and weekends.

The total cost of that expansion is about $1.86 million. Local governments and riders will pay a little more than half that amount. Revenue from riders is expected to be about $300,000, leaving local governments to cover around $700,000 of the expansion’s cost. The province will foot the rest of the bill for the expansion.

CORRECTION: This story has been edited to correct Alison Stewart’s position. She is the manager of strategic planning at the FVRD, not BC Transit.