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Wait - lose the trains and add buses, boats, limousines and vans
Planes, trains and automobiles...

Jim Kernaghan Special to Sun Media

November 22, 2007

Aboutown Transportation Limited is celebrating its 60th anniversary on the road and now on water, in the air and certainly on more land as the company footprint widens through an expanding network dedicated to moving people, packages and products throughout Ontario and beyond.

You could compare Aboutown to a two-stage rocket, the first when it was launched in 1947 with a handful of taxis in downtown London. The booster rockets kicked in later when a 22-year-old University of Western Ontario law student/part-time taxi driver named Jim Donnelly bought the company in 1974.

It wasn't as though he was entering uncharted waters. He'd been driving a taxi while attending Western and had started working as a dispatcher at his father's Peterborough taxi company Call-A-Cab Ltd at age 14. Acquiring Aboutown turned out to be a launching pad of some proportions. The various divisions (airport transportation, limousine, urban transit, school busing, paratransit, courier, medical patient transfer) involve a total fleet of approximately 400 vehicles on land, sea and air, including 50 urban transit and charter buses, 10 limousines, 25 medical transfer vans, school buses, courier units, boats, and one aircraft.

Taxicabs are at the vanguard of the overall fleet, having expanded from the 39-vehicle operation Donnelly purchased 33 years ago to the current 166 modern cars. The blue in their blue and white colours, interestingly, is almost an exact match for the United Nations blue, rather representative of the many nationalities that comprise the Aboutown family. The company was voted one of the 10 best places to work in London and was twice a London Business Achievement finalist.

Donnelly has been a member of the Taxicab Limousine and Paratransit Association, which represents fleets world-wide, since 1974 and currently serves as International Vice- President. In 2004, the TLPA recognized Donnelly and the people of Aboutown as the Fleet Operator of the Year, Large Fleet Category: "In recognition of exceptional management of an outstanding community taxicab service focused on safety, maintenance and professionalism." He is past president of the Canadian Taxi Association and the SKAL International of London. Aboutown is a member of the London, St. Thomas, and Chatham-Kent Chambers of Commerce, the London Better Business Bureau and long-time supporter of a wide range of London charities. Aboutown is also a member of various other local, provincial, national and international industry associations.

From the old mechanical taxi meters of early days, Aboutown has gone space age in terms of communications and is second to none in the country for cutting edge technology that will enable the company to handle an estimated two million calls in 2007.

Aboutown is the only London taxi company to offer wheelchair accessible taxicabs to the travelling public with special needs. The company recently purchased a wheelchair-accessible taxi from a London, England company, one with left-hand drive, that will also be available for regular calls.

Aboutown's Medical Transfer services a dozen hospitals in centres beyond London including Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, Brantford, St. Thomas and Owen Sound.

What about the other Aboutown services? As pointed out in accompanying articles, there's a growing busing system that encompasses urban transit systems in St. Thomas and Chatham along with a link system that can move passengers from Owen Sound through London to St. Thomas and many smaller centres in between without the rider having to leave the bus. The company's 56-passenger Prevost highway coach is dedicated to both charters and, when required, an airport busing operation the company recently instituted.

As with the rest of the fleet, green is the goal from the "shared rides" provided by our transit fleets to the majority of rolling stock operating on propane or ultra-low sulphur diesel.

Hey, we haven't forgotten the boats. Aboutown owns the Foot's Bay Marina on Lake Joseph in Muskoka and has water taxis there. The air? With fellow pilot Dr. Tom Reavell, partner in Trillium Sport Aviation Inc. they own an aircraft hanger rental facility at London International Airport. Jim Donnelly also pilots his own sport aircraft and has been known to monitor his busing operations in Chatham, St. Thomas and Owen Sound in one airborne swing to make sure everything is rolling, as it should.

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