Arbutus Fail and Other Transit Thoughts

Contrary to TransLink’s claims, the Canada line

has 40m to 50m long station platforms, which severely limits capacity.

In today’s Sun, there is an article by Pete McMartin, bemoaning the current state of the Arbutus Corridor debate.

What the Vancouver Sun and the City of Vancouver are dancing around, yet never mention is that that the Arbutus corridor should be used for transit, particularly light rail transit. $100 million for 11 km of rights-of-way is a steal, when one compares it with the cost of $$200 million plus, for 1 km. of subway construction!

By promoting transit use for the Arbutus corridor, would make the Sun, TransLink and the city of Vancouver admit that the $2.5 billion Canada Line was built with extremely limited capacity 9for a metro) and the cost to upgrade the Canada line so it could carry as many people as a simple streetcar line would be in excess of $1 billion!Metro Vancouver, the formerly named GVRD, should purchase the Arbutus corridor, build LRT from downtown Vancouver to Steveston and Ironwood Mall (the CNR R-o-W in Richmond is up for sale for $65 million) and hire a private operator to operate it and ignore TransLink all together.

Bridgeport Station, badly located and not designed for customer comport.

The photo clearly shows the small Canada Line stations.

For public transit to be successful, it must be user friendly, but recent experiences using transit have proven otherwise. Taking transit on purpose three times this summer, found the transit service greatly underwhelming. The forced transfer from the Canada line to South Fraser suburban buses, is just plain stupid, especially at weekends, where many services run at 30 minute headway’s. The transfer station at “Casino Junction” (Bridgeport Station) is hard to use and damn cold, in non summer months.

If the current transit operations is the best that TransLink can do, all I can say it is time for regime change.

 

The SFPR (Hwy 17) junction with Hwy 99. Lots of overpasses, but poorly designed

and dangerous for commercial vehicles.

The multi billion dollar South Fraser Perimeter Road is nothing but high farce; poorly designed and poorly sign posted, the SFPR only shows how incompetent our current provincial Ministry of Transportation is. Designed as a speedy truck route from the Delta Super Port, East up the Fraser Valley, the SFPR is largely avoided by truckers by it’s ill design, especially at important junctions where roll-overs are common.

Added to this gross incompetence, getting on or off the SFPR from Hwy. 99 or any major junction by the uninitiated, is akin to a Mensa test; fail and you are off to destinations unknown. More and more, BC’s Ministry of Transportation is nothing more than a repository for people who could not get jobs in the real world.

More and more it seems the SFPR is nothing more than a taxpayer paid sop to the McQuarie group, who owns the South Fraser Docks and wants the province to dredge the Fraser and replace the Massey Tunnel, so it can bring Panama Max bulk carriers up the Fraser to load American coal bound for South Asia.

Comments

One Response to “Arbutus Fail and Other Transit Thoughts”
  1. Sean says:

    The other problem here for Translink is that the executives don’t know what passengers actually need. 3D express coach systems can be tried out in very busy streets, and light rail on medium level of business streets.

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