Eric Chris Responds To The SkyTrain Lobby
Eric Chris responds to the SkyTrain for Surrey blog.
It is just not Zweisystem who has questions about SkyTrain and TransLink and Eric Chris’s reply to the SkyTrain Lobby has great merit.
The Vancouver Sun has always treated SkyTrain as a “mother and apple pie issue” and has never challenged the government on building more. It seems Patricia Graham is from the “school of any rapid transit is good rapid transit“, even though it may bankrupt the taxpayer. The Vancouver Sun’s Editorial Board should hang their collective heads in shame with its reporting on SkyTrain and censoring anti-SkyTrain correspondence.
Again I pose this question to the SkyTrain lobby: “Why after being on the market for over 33 years have only seven SkyTrain type systems have been built and why has SkyTrain never been allowed to compete against LRT on a level playing field, in open bidding?”
Thanks for letting me know about the comments on the following website:
It isn’t worth replying to Daryl and friends. Some quick comments:
First, TransLink collected ~$1.3 billion from the federal government et al and another ~$700 million from In-Transit or private partners (see Source 1 and Source 2, below). The RAV Line is not making much of any money and TransLink has been lying about the 100,000 “people” on board daily (really less than 40,000 people, many transfers generating no income for the RAV Line). The $100 million or more annually in performance payments for the next 30 years is paying back the private partners for their “investment”, and the undiscounted cost to TransLink is going to be about $4.5 billion after 30 years. Ultimately, a financial audit is required to find out how much the RAV Line is costing taxpayers because TransLink isn’t going to willingly provide this information.
If TransLink had built a LRT Line, instead, the cost would have been no more than ~$1.3 billion allowing ~$500 million for the bridge. Ridership would have been built up gradually, and the LRT line would have been serving local area transit users. It would have had excess capacity and most transit users would have had a seat, even at rush hour. Revenue from the LRT line would have paid for the operating costs and maintenance (possibly with money left over for a profit) as TransLink would have avoided being in the hole $700 million which is going to be repaid to the investors of the RAV Line (with a huge premium).
Also, LRT would have avoided the #15 Cambie diesel bus operating along the RAV Line route to feed the RAV Line (TransLink tore down the trolley bus lines and residents along Cambie Street are furious about the diesel bus noise and pollution but the media won’t write about it).
Second, the provincial government is forcing SkyTrain onto the mayors as the following terse email from Dianne Watts implies:
“From:Watts, Dianne
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 10:04 PM
To: ec
Subject: Re: Is the Vancouver Sun controlled by the provincial government?
They will pull the funding if it is not for Evergreen Line and MRN and Bus expansion.
From: EC
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 09:04 PM
To: pgraham@vancouversun.com <pgraham@vancouversun.com>
Cc: gregor robertson <gregor.robertson@vancouver.ca>; Watts, Dianne; Richard Stewart <rstewart@coquitlam.ca>; Pamela Goldsmith-Jones <pgoldsmith-jones@westvancouver.ca>
Subject: Is the Vancouver Sun controlled by the provincial government?
Patricia,
You are right, it would be prudent for the mayors to take the $1 billion (about $800 million, really) from the provincial and federal governments for transit:
There are no strings attached by the federal government for its portion of the transit grant and there is no requirement for TransLink to build a SkyTrain line. It can simply build a streetcar or LRT line which it can afford and pocket the rest of the $500 million to “improve” transit for the entire region.
If the provincial government is going to threaten to withdraw its portion for transit in an attempt to force another SkyTrain line like it did with the Canada Line, the mayors can call the provincial government’s bluff. The provincial government will fold.
Your continual propaganda favouring SkyTrain transit for the Evergreen line has been despicable. You and your pet transit reporter working for TransLink have never once provided balanced reporting to give people here the facts on transit. You have deliberately ignored the merits of streetcar and LRT transit.
You have never once questioned the credibility of the false information provided by TransLink and have continually published misleading information by TransLink to deceive the public. That’s the unfortunate truth.
ec”
Third, the $9.34 in 2010 is the daily cost per rider without taxes subsidizing TransLink (~90% confidence interval as TransLink is not transparent on how it spends its money). It refers to the entire transit system and all operating costs ($989 million in expenditures). It represents the real cost to put someone onto transit for one day on average by TransLink. Daryl is partly right, here – it might be reduced by at most $119 million if the listed roads, bridges and bicycle expenses aren’t integral to transit operations (that is, the expenses aren’t bike racks for buses, bus loop road modifications or SkyTrain bridge work, for example, see Appendix 2A) to make the daily cost per rider for TransLink at least $8.22 on average (still too high):
In future years, the daily cost per rider will very likely increase as 2010 was the year of the Olympics and an anomaly with many more riders than normal (reducing the daily cost per rider for TransLink). Operating expenditures over the next decade are forecast to increase by about 30% which could increase the daily cost per rider to much more than $10 if ridership growth stalls or slows. This isn’t unexpected as transit use fluctuates up and down over time.
TransLink collected $690 million in taxes in 2010. There is no way that it costs TransLink $660 million annually to operate transit as Daryl suggests.
Fourth, if there is any uncertainty about the degradation of the air quality from TransLink’s excessive use of diesel buses on SkyTrain routes, an environmental impact assessment would clear the air. The relationship between diesel exhaust and cancer is well known:
Fifth, the B-Line carries about 20,000 people daily (~500 trips averaging about 30 to 40 people per trip) with about 60,000 boardings from the same 20,000 people. On weekends, summers and holidays it is about one-half this. If ICBC counted drivers like TransLink counts transit users, there would be 7 million drivers for the 2.4 million population in Metro-Vancouver.
The B-Line has nothing to do with fast and reliable service. From 6 am to 7:30 am on a two minute schedule, the B-Line operates (along Broadway with stop signs every few blocks) with almost no one on board before the UBC students roll out of bed. TransLink has lots of money and can afford to operate empty buses every two minutes. From about 8 am most buses to UBC are packed while the ones returning to Commercial Drive are “not in service” and totally empty. At the same time, no one is using the #9 trolley buses operating on a 10 minute schedule.
If TransLink operated all buses to UBC (there are over 10 bus routes to UBC) at the same frequency (two minute or 10 minute, for instance), there wouldn’t be any overcrowding on the B-Line to UBC and the B-Line would not be carrying about one-third of the students going to UBC. However, TransLink is creating the overcrowding to make it seem as if transit by TransLink is “putting people on transit” and to purposely create the “overcrowding problem” so that it can offer the solution: $3.5 billion for a SkyTrain route!
TransLink is merely stealing riders from trolley bus routes and increasing carbon emissions by 5,000 tonnes annually without increasing ridership with the B-Line service. It is also impairing the health of residents with toxic PM. This is so that the bureaucrats earning $20,000 monthly to $30,000 monthly at TransLink can spend the next 20 years doing studies and providing grants to UBC economics professors to prove that SkyTrain is economical. If TransLink built a streetcar line to UBC, it would take one year and cost about $300 million, but then we wouldn’t need TransLink…
It is getting late… the rest of Daryl’s post is just more gibberish.
ec
http://www.rockantenne.de/webplayer/?playchannel=alternative
Source 1:
Source 2:
