Meg Hodges: Rural Transit Needs Integration, Modernization and Room to Grow
Updated: Aug 28
I spoke with Meg Hodges, General Manager of Tidal Transit in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, about the realities of operating public transit across a large rural service area. We discussed Tidal Transit’s evolution from Kings Transit, the challenges of maintaining service with an aging fleet, the gap between capital and operating funding, opportunities for integrated rural mobility, changing fleet strategies, and how even basic technology could transform day-to-day transit operations.
Tell me about Tidal Transit, its history, what the organization does today, and the communities and passengers you serve.
We started in 1978 as a volunteer-run organization with a school bus operating between the towns of Wolfville and Kentville in rural Nova Scotia. Within two years, they realized it was too big a project to handle on their own, so it transitioned to the municipalities to own and operate. In 1981, Kings Transit was formed.
Since then, we have served the region in all kinds of piecemeal ways. We started between Wolfville and Kentville, then branched out over time to Windsor, Berwick and Greenwood, and into Digby County and Annapolis County. We later retracted out of Windsor. It has been a journey of growth, contraction, growth and contraction, and I think we are in a growth phase right now.
We have 13 buses when things are going well, with seven buses on the road every day. Until the beginning of this month we had five routes, but we have now combined them into four. We serve about 350,000 to 400,000 passengers a year.
Our system is very linear. We are roughly 200 kilometres from top to bottom, which creates some really interesting challenges. We mostly serve rural communities and connect towns along that linear system.
The dream would be to move toward feeder routes and express buses on the highway, with more on-demand service and microtransit as technology and operations allow. But we are very much a product of our funding and what public transit has looked like in rural Nova Scotia for the last 45 years.
Tell me about your own journey to becoming General Manager of Tidal Transit and how your experience has shaped the way you look at rural public transit.
I have been General Manager here for about a year and a half. I ran for municipal politics in 2016 as a bright-eyed 20-something who wanted to see better rural public transit. I had a one-year-old at the time and envisioned him being able to take the bus where we live. Ten years later, the system still does not connect there, but we will get there.
I grew up in Wolfville and in the Valley and rode transit as a kid, so it is a system I have known my whole life. I went to high school and university in Ontario, and I really came of age in transportation through the TTC network and what was available in southwestern Ontario. It was efficient, connected, and you could get where you needed to go.
When I moved back to Nova Scotia, first to Halifax and then an hour outside the city in the Annapolis Valley, that was not the case. It became very clear how important transportation is for being able to access school, recreation, employment or whatever else you need to do.
That is true for young people, older people and people in the middle of their lives. Public transit is an important part of keeping movement and community accessible and equitable, especially in rural settings.
I originally thought being an elected official would be how I could get things done. I learned pretty quickly that being in an operational leadership role and providing leadership and positivity could be far more impactful than sitting in a seat and getting to vote once a month. It was a great lesson, and I am thrilled to be here.
What is the biggest change happening in rural and community transit today, or the biggest change you expect over the next several years?
I do not think it would be offensive to say that Nova Scotia is typically about 40 years behind everybody else in a lot of things. For us, the future is already happening elsewhere.
On-demand transit, microtransit, more ride-sharing and greater interconnectedness are what I see coming. Our legislation is old, and it creates backlogs and makes it difficult for organizations to collaborate.
We are also unique because we are owned by seven municipalities. I am not dealing with one city government or one municipal unit. There are seven. We also have community paratransit systems operating independently of us. We do not integrate with those systems or their equipment, which means there are stranded assets sitting idle for large portions of the day that I cannot access.
For us, a major opportunity is figuring out how to collaborate with other providers and create the kind of integration that is already happening elsewhere.
If I were looking 20 years into the future for Nova Scotia, I would love to see one integrated system from a technology perspective. We could remain independent providers with our own operating budgets and systems, but share one technology platform for tracking buses, purchasing tickets and connecting across systems.
Operators would still know where their individual responsibilities begin and end, but it would be seamless for passengers. Someone could come into Nova Scotia, buy a week-long pass and use light rail, buses or other services without ever really knowing that they were moving between different systems.
The goal would be a platform where you do not need a car and can get where you need to go in a reasonable amount of time.
Have you seen examples elsewhere of the kind of integrated rural transit system you would like to build?
Link Transit in Wenatchee, Washington, really stands out to me. When I went there and experienced what they had, the fact that paratransit, fixed-route transit and on-demand transit were all integrated into one system was absolutely game-changing. It was almost unimaginable compared with where I live, and I think it should be the gold standard.
Cape Breton Regional Municipality also has integration with its paratransit system, and Halifax has integration with paratransit. Most transit systems have that integration. We are unusual in not having it, and it is difficult to know how we get there when there are more than 20 separate paratransit operators across Nova Scotia that do not integrate with a fixed-route system.
Which policy or regulatory issues are having the greatest impact on rural transit today, and what would you like to see change?
One of the biggest impacts for us is that our operating budget is very small, and growth or change in almost any form is extremely difficult.
We simply do not have the population density to generate enough fare revenue to significantly increase our operating budget. It currently costs $4 to access our system. You can travel from Wolfville all the way to Weymouth for $4, which is roughly a 200-kilometre journey. But if you travel from Wolfville to Kentville, which is less than 20 kilometres, it is also $4.
Our fare structure does not make it easy to collect more revenue, but if we charged substantially more, the service would become inaccessible for many people, particularly those using it more frequently within the tighter urban areas.
We do not receive provincial operating funding or federal operating funding. Those levels of government are very generous with capital funding, which is great. We can buy buses, but I cannot afford to put fuel in the buses or drivers in the seats to expand the system.
Our frequency is not ideal. We are not frequent enough and we are not connected enough. We are working on being reliable enough, but that is about the only thing we can afford to focus on.
If I could change one policy, it would be to make more operating funding available for rural public transit.
You recently announced an additional $10 million in federal and provincial funding. How will that change the service you can deliver, and what is the funding intended to support?
Because we are owned by seven municipalities, it can sometimes be challenging to survive election cycles and changes in political will. There has probably been about 10 years of what I would call chronic neglect, not out of malice, but because everyone was trying to figure out how to work together and what they actually wanted transit to be.
During that period, there was very little investment in new buses. The last buses added to our fleet came in 2021, and those buses already have more than 800,000 kilometres on them. Some of our buses are pushing two million kilometres.
We have not had a full new-bus procurement since then. A lot of what we have today is used equipment retired from Halifax Transit or purchased from Ontario.
We even have one bus that we lovingly call the 'Kijiji bus' because we literally bought it off Kijiji. Someone had purchased it to turn it into a camper, realized how difficult it was to work on a transit bus, and put it back up for sale. It is a 2009 New Flyer with around 1.5 million kilometres on it, and it is still running.
We also have five Nova Buses that came from Grand River Transit last summer that we are still working to put on the road. All of them have well over a million kilometres, but they are still in better shape than most of what we have.
When things are going well, we have 13 buses. For most of last year, we had eight. We had to suspend a route and operate only six buses for much of the year. We only returned to seven buses on the road this month.
We now have our frequency back up and are delivering an on-time performance that has not been seen here for about five years. When I first arrived, buses breaking down every day was common. Because the system is so linear, we could be 40 minutes behind schedule, or two hours behind if one, two or three buses broke down. We were not connected, reliable or frequent, and we were losing passengers quickly.
This year has really been about reputational repair. We have been plugging the holes and trying to keep the ship from sinking.
At the same time, our governance organization signed a new ownership agreement that makes it clear the municipalities care about public transit, want to fund it more and are invested in it. That allowed us to procure six new hybrid-electric buses. They also gave us a 10% increase in our operating budget, which probably had not happened in more than 15 years.
Unfortunately, fuel prices then increased dramatically, and that operating increase has essentially been absorbed by fuel costs.
The new capital funding is very important because we clearly need to rejuvenate the fleet. But purchasing six buses all at once is risky when your fleet is this small. At the end of their lifespan, you end up at another cliff where six buses need to leave the fleet at once.
With this next $10 million, we plan to stagger the entry of new buses, potentially bringing in two each year, so we can develop a healthier asset-management plan.
We also need to take the time to ask why these communities want to provide public transit and what they want that service to look like. Do 40-foot buses make sense everywhere? Would smaller vehicles operating in smaller communities and connecting to larger buses on express highway routes make more sense?
My goal is to give the board a menu of options: here is what you can do, here is what it will cost, and here is what people have been asking for.
We have mountains of public engagement and feedback. People want us to run later at night, run more frequently, operate on Sundays and expand farther into rural communities. All of those things have a price tag, and without more operating funding we cannot fundamentally change what we do.
I would be the first to admit that what we do is not awesome, but it is important. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. I am trying to build that plan with the board for the next five and ten years.
My longer-term dream would be to potentially bypass some of the battery transition altogether and become a hydrogen fleet in the late 2030s. But first, we have to get through where we are now and survive long enough to start thinking at that scale.
Which organizations or transit systems do you think are making the biggest difference in rural and community transit today?
My overall time working directly in transit is relatively short compared with many people in the industry. One thing I have learned in my community and organization is that it is not only about knowing transit. A huge part of my job is knowing politics.
I always talk about Link Transit in Wenatchee because I thought the organization and structure were amazing. I recently saw a heat map showing communities where public-transit usage represented a significant percentage of travel. There were only a few concentrated areas, including places like New York City, California, Toronto and Montreal, and Wenatchee stood out as one of those pockets. Their system integration is something I continue to look at.
I also watch the Niagara region, including St. Catharines, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie. They have done a lot of work integrating rural service into the broader urban system and trying to make it operate more as one network. I think there is something there to model.
I am also watching systems using on-demand transit. I am interested in places that started with smaller vehicles, watched the data, and then developed fixed routes based on how those smaller services were actually being used.
We are in a unique position because we have 40-foot buses trying to cover an enormous territory without enough vehicles. Anytime I see smaller vehicles being integrated into communities in a more accessible and passenger-focused way, I pay attention.
I am also going to Italy this fall as part of a Michelin mobility conference. Because Michelin has tire manufacturing here in Nova Scotia, we are connected with other Michelin communities in places including Italy, France, Spain and the Carolinas. They hold mobility conferences and labs, and I am looking forward to learning from what those communities are doing.
Organizations such as CUTA are also extremely important for us. There are not many Nova Scotian or even Atlantic Canadian systems actively participating because many cannot afford the memberships or conferences. Without those conferences and organizations such as CUTRIC, I do not think we would learn nearly as much about what is happening elsewhere because we are so often stuck in survival mode.
Even though those organizations can be very urban-focused, they are still extremely valuable to rural operators like us.
Where do you see AI having the greatest practical impact on rural transit, service planning and passenger experience?
I adore my team, but we are still at a point where basic digital processes can be challenging. So the idea of suddenly implementing AI everywhere is pretty funny to me.
Right now, we use AI for things such as building code for our website and helping us digitize internal processes that previously happened on paper or on a whiteboard. It is not a huge integration yet.
As our hybrid buses arrive and we modernize the fleet, I think diagnostic tools will become very important, particularly for our mechanics.
Before we even get deeply into AI, though, there is a lot of basic technology that could change things for us.
We still manually count passengers. When someone gets onto the vehicle, the driver pushes a button on a small keyboard. At the end of the route, they reset the system, write down the totals for each community, add those numbers together at the end of the shift and hand the paper to someone at the depot. That person manually puts the data into a spreadsheet, and that eventually becomes the KPI data I take to my board.
Something as basic as automatic passenger counters would be a major improvement for us. Beyond that, I can see opportunities such as geofenced advertising using AI algorithms to pull information from local events, and better integration of population-density and planning data.
We are a very farmland-intensive region, and protecting farmland is central to municipal planning. There is an opportunity to use data to forecast where growth will happen, understand what that growth should look like, and determine whether our route-development policies suggest that in five years we should introduce new routes or change how existing ones operate.
But right now, we do not even know how to crawl. It is difficult to imagine running with AI before we have put some of those more fundamental technologies in place.
I’d like to thank Meg for taking the time to share her perspective. Her experience leading a rural transit system gives her a grounded view of what communities need to make service more connected, modern and sustainable over the long term.
-Adam
Comments