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Transit riders have a love-hate relationship with our “people’s limousine.” For many, it’s their only means of mobility. Others ride because they believe urban life is better when people use public transit rather than choking the roads with single-occupancy cars.

At the same time, one of life’s mid-sized stressors is peering into the distance on a cold, snowy Winnipeg morning to see whether your late bus is yet on the horizon and, when it appears, whether it’s full to capacity and going to roll past. It’s the kind of thing that pushes you back into the car, if you have access to one.

We could make a big dent in this daily anxiety, help pay transit workers fairly and do our part to stave off climate disaster by restoring a tried-and-true funding scheme: the 50-50 model. This shared-cost model, in which the provincial government pays half of transit operating costs over and above service revenues, was brought in when I was a kid waiting to board the bus with my parents in the 1970s.

The Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon initially ditched it in 1993. New Democrats reinstalled it in 2007, with then-Lt.-Gov. John Harvard announcing in the 2006 throne speech: “Manitoba is committed to increased provincial funding for transit operating costs in Thompson, Flin Flon, Brandon and Winnipeg, restoring the 50-50 funding partnership that was in place prior to the cutbacks of the 1990s.”