Lambton County Council wants to take another look at a regional transit system.
During this month's council meeting, county staff was directed to revisit and deliver a report regarding the potential for a transit system by July 5.
Warwick Township Mayor Todd Case said he wanted to bring back an old report and try to broaden it in future discussions.
"I know that a lot of people have chosen to live in the rural area, a lot of people now with an aging population are not driving, so there's some issues [and] a lot of young people, students, maybe travelling to Lambton College looking for that same transportation," said Case. "I do know it's an expensive piece of business to get into, but with all of these new [transportation] partnerships that are out there, I was wondering, perhaps, if maybe we could take a look at that again."
Infrastructure and Development General Manager Jason Cole said the idea was initially explored "quite some time ago" when the county looked at a pilot project in the Simcoe area.
"At that time when the report came back, it was not seen to be feasible and nothing else was done towards that," said Cole. "Since that time, some local municipalities have opted to operate through the provincial grant system that was set up."
Cole mentioned the Huron-Shores Network and the service between Sarnia, Strathroy and London.
Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley agreed with Case's call to take another look at the transit report.
"I think I instigated that a number of years ago and it wasn't practical at that time, but times have changed. So I think we need to take a look at it, instill, I believe, move to an Uber system, which seems to be working," said Bradley. "We hear it continually, we hear it from people in St. Clair wanting to come to Sarnia, vice versa, we hear it out in the county."
Brooke-Alvinston Mayor Dave Ferguson also liked the idea of looking into a regional transit system.
"Can we get some of the students out on buses out to the rural areas where there might be affordable housing, or people who are aging can rent out rooms," said Ferguson. "And we need to get the new Canadians into the rural areas." After the motion passed unanimously, Bradley introduced a related motion that called on the province to release a southwestern Ontario transportation report immediately.
Bradley said a number of people worked on the report over the last 18 months to two years and that it was given to Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney about 14 months ago.
"This is way too long to wait. It involved roads, it involved the border crossings, it involved air," said Bradley. "We really did a lot of work for 18 months and it's been sitting there for all this time with no response to us."
Bradley added that the word is, there's a cabinet shuffle coming to Queen's Park.
"And I don't want to wait for another six months to one year to get this report released," said Bradley. "It's becoming stale-dated because of the inactivity by the government on moving forward on it."
That motion also carried.