Ward 4 councillor and mayoral candidate Chris Holt has released another plank of his campaign, focused on improving public transit if elected.
Holt laid out his plans for improving transit on Thursday with an emphasis on investments, implementation, and increased ridership.
He says good transit is a catalyst for building good communities, access to jobs and private investment.
"The City of Windsor prioritizes road infrastructure spending over transit spending more than any other community in the province. Our per capita expenditure on transit is one of the lowest in Ontario."
Holt referenced a series of master plans already endorsed by City Council as the blueprint the community has to build upon.
He says the new Transit Windsor express route that was rejected during 2022 budget deliberations, the 418X Transit Windsor bus, would be a priority and needs to be fast tracked by the next council.
"What we ended up doing is punting it down the road and then altering existing bus routes, actually making them poorer bus routes, to service the Lancer Centre," he continued. "We need to reverse that ASAP because we need to actually improve transit as opposed to fiddling the dials a little bit and making existing routes worse."
Holt says he believes the investments continuing to be made in road infrastructure are crucial to growth in the city, but is calling out what he says are imbalances in spending priorities.
He says the system has been designed to prioritize one mode of transportation over others, and would like to see biggest investments in public transit and active transportation.
"These are all modes of transportation that will benefit the City in the net run fiscally. Because one of our biggest expenditures in our capital budget is road maintenance. It's cleaning the roads, it's fixing the potholes, policing the roads and emergency services on our roads because we push everybody into that one mode of transportation," he said.
The City of Windsor unanimously approving the ‘More Than Transit master plan’ back in January 2020, and Holt says a number of initiatives have been deferred to the 2023 Capital Budget which the new council will have to deal with.
Holt is one of seven candidates running for mayor, along with Drew Dilkens, Benjamin Danyluk, Aaron Day, Matthew Giancola, Ernie Lamont, and Louis Vaupotic.
- with files from AM800's Rob Hindi