Kenneth Brown
of The Crossroads

Alsask Bus Services Ltd. has shut its doors for good after providing a passenger and freight service for six years. The region no longer has a transit service.

Ximing Lu, the former owner of Alsask Bus Services, operates the Red Lion Restaurant in Alsask. The last buses to operate on the company’s Saskatoon-Calgary route ran on March 10. The company started a Saskatoon-Regina route in December and the route was terminated on March 1.

The private bus company was established in 2012 with the help of Community Futures Meridian Region. Lu decided to start his own bus service after Greyhound Canada stopped operating its route from Alsask to Calgary.

Lu worked with the former Saskatchewan Transit Company (STC) to ensure a seamless bus service from Saskatoon to Calgary. One of the reasons Lu decided to establish a bus service is he relied on freight service to supply his restaurant with food. The bus company did well until STC shut down in 2017.

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The owner said the bus company was losing business with no connecting route from Alsask to Saskatoon, so he applied to the Saskatchewan Highway Traffic Board to operate the route. The traffic board approved the application for the route in July 2017.

Alsask Bus Services was approved to operate a Saskatoon-Regina route three months before closing its doors. Lu said Greyhound does not offer service between Saskatchewan’s two largest cities, so he saw an opportunity.

He said in January that he was also going to look for further opportunities to add branch routes to locations such as Prince Albert, but the company did not survive. Lu explained that the passenger service was not busy enough to keep the company afloat, but the freight service was helping to offset the lack of passengers.

In an interview earlier in March, Lu said his decision to shut down the bus company was a simple business decision he had to make. Even with the combination of passenger and freight services, there was just not enough revenue to keep going.

“There was not enough income to cover that,” he said of the bus service. He made attempts to generate more revenue on the freight side of the business and it just did not work out. “I tried to work on it.”

Lu said he could not expect the passenger service to pay for itself and it was something he learned early on, so he needed as much freight revenue as possible to supplement the income required to keep the company afloat. The company had limitations for shipping freight in Saskatchewan, he said.

The company had the drivers it needed to keep the buses going but he did not have the revenue to keep the company going, he said. Lu added that he is not happy the bus company had to shut down, but he will continue to operate his restaurant.

Just days before Lu received a permit to operate a route from Alsask to Saskatoon, the highway traffic board approved a permit for another bus company to operate a scheduled passenger service between Saskatoon and Alsask.

Engelheim Charter Inc., a company based in White City, applied to add scheduled passenger service from Regina to several locations. The application included routes to Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Yorkton, Swift Current and Coronach, along with the route from Saskatoon to Alsask.

Gladys Engel, an owner of the bus company, said the company did a feasibility study on a running scheduled passenger service out of Regina, but the result suggested the idea would not end up being feasible. The research included reaching out to post-secondary institutions to canvass whether or not there was a large enough demand, she noted.

“We just felt that it wasn’t in the best interest (of the company), but we did research it and we did consider it,” Engel said, adding that it has been a busy winter for the company’s regular charter bus service.

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