THUNDER BAY -- Thunder Bay Transit has no immediate plans to follow the lead of the City of Winnipeg in piloting free Wi-Fi on its buses.
Winnipeg's transit system recently received approval for a $300,000, one-year project offering Wi-Fi on a dozen buses.
It's been estimated that expanding the service to the entire fleet would cost in the millions of dollars.
Thunder Bay Transit manager Brad Loroff has told tbnewswatch.com there are no plans to emulate Winnipeg's experiment.
"At this point in time exploring placing Wi-Fi on buses in Thunder Bay is cost-prohibitive and there are other unfunded capital and service related improvement projects needed to make transit better that are already in the queue and remain a greater priority," Loroff said in an email.
He added that "it will be interesting" to see what results Winnipeg gets from its trial.
Winnipeg Transit will rotate the Wi-Fi service, placing hotspots on different buses on different routes at different times of the day in order to establish a usage pattern.
