While downtown on a beautiful Friday afternoon taking some pictures of the hundreds of guests brought to our shores by the Grand Princess cruise ship I saw three buses with the name 'Cruise Victoria' on there side. I had to presume they were indeed transporting our guests from the NANAIMO cruise ship terminal and were not bringing tourists from Victoria to our lovely city.
The burning question of course is why the heck does Nanaimo have to hire buses from Victoria to shuttle cruise ship passengers around town?
I seem to recall that last year the same question came up and that for some reason the RDN could not supply buses to do the job and the Victoria company had to be hired at the last moment.
Seems to me we just finished adding a whole bunch of shiny new compressed natural gas buses to the fleet and surely there must be three or four of those buses which could be pressed into service for the day?
I have always been under the impression that our shiny new Cruise Ship Terminal was to help feed new dollars into the local economy. I did not think it was to shovel dollars into the Victoria economy. I hope our guests realized they were in NANAIMO and not Victoria. I intend to ask a few questions, and when I get an answer I will follow it up here.
Also, the bus is entering what is clearly marked as 'Exit Only'
ReplyDeleteActually they were going around the corner on Front Street, and did not enter into the Seaspan Yard (also known as the Wellcox property we bought, but have nearly no use of).
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