War on Buses? Er…No, Just Very Bad Planning

Is there a war on buses in Vancouver?

Sorry, no.

Instead thereAi??has been an ongoingAi??war on good transit planning and those supporting bad transit planning won decades ago. The real problem is and always has beenAi??SkyTrain and the massive costs associated with the mini-metro.

The taxpayer has paid about three to five times more for the proprietary SkyTrain light-metro than originally planned light rail without any added benefit. Today, we have spent over $8 billion (those pesky debt servicing charges and retrofitting costs do add up) on a SkyTrain network that has taken over 25 years to build just three lines of which one, the Canada Line, isn’t SkyTrain at all.Ai??TheAi??present mini-metroAi??networkAi??almost mirrors the original 1978, $800 million Vancouver to Richmond, Surrey and Lougheed Mall LRT scheme! The extra large sums of money spent on SkyTrain could have been spent on extending the LRT to include at least two North South and two East West LRT corridors in Vancouver; LRT to Steveston and Ironwood Mall; and LRT to the Tri-Cities, bringing quality public transit to a much larger audience. The larger the transit customer base, the more people that will use public transit.

It is SkyTrain light metro that has bankrupted TransLink and piling tax uponAi??user feesAi??to fund transit will simply fail to stop the rot!

TransLink’s funding has not been kneecapped, as claimed by Mr. Ladner,Ai??rather the porcine TransLink is dying of financial obesity andAi??no matter how much money we pour into the transit agency, it will never be enough money to pay for bloated transit proposals put forward by equally bloated planning bureaucracies!

Notice Mr. Ladner, no one buys SkyTrain anymore?

One also tires of SFU City Program Director Gordon Priceai??i??s continuedAi??hype and hooplaAi??on transit, as he is no more a transit expert than Zwei! Mr. Price has had decades to understand how a public transit system works, but he hasn’t bothered to and has joined the ‘tax and spend’ crowd that continually demand more money for TransLink, hoping the more money one throws at TransLink, the better it will become. Sadly, hell will freeze over first!

If Mr. Ladner wants to improve transit without breaking the bank, he must think out of the box andAi??demand TransLink to plan for what the customer wants and can afford and not what the bureaucrat’s want. TransLink must abandon SkyTrain light-metro planning in favour of modern light rail, if these conditions are not met, TransLink will impale itself on huge debt.

There never was a war on buses, instead the transit battle in Vancouver was lost when the first kilometre of SkyTrain was built!

Toronto transit on the right road; Vancouverai??i??s hits dead end

The war against the bus has been won

By Peter Ladner Tue Jul 31, 2012

Why are leaders in Toronto smarter than leaders in Metro Vancouver?

Both cities have a remarkably similar problem: the local transportation authority ai???has an approved plan to build the system we need, but we have nowhere near the funds to pay for it. We have to be open to ways to raise money that are dedicated to getting this done … We need to move people and goods quickly and easily for our region to be a great place to live, work, play and invest, and yet weai??i??re decades behind in making that happen ai??i?? Everyone agrees we have a crisis on our hands. We want to give residents a way to say, ai???we need a better system, and we need to find sustainable ways to pay for itai??i??.ai???

In Vancouver, thatai??i??s the message coming from a group of UBC students whose frustration over getting passed up by 99-B-line buses is spilling over into a wider campaign headed into the public domain in September. While every word of that quote rings true in Metro Vancouver, it comes from the mouth of business and political leader John Tory, chairman of the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance (GTCAA), a formidable blue-chip organization that is launching a major community campaign for transportation funding in Metro Toronto this fall.

The GTCAA announced its 27 Regional Transportation Champions ai??i??representing more than two million employees, students, customers and members across Metro Toronto and Hamilton ai??i?? almost to the day that Vancouver was tagged as the most congested city in Canada, and the second-most congested in North America after Los Angeles. That dubious title (based on dubious methodology, it must be said) was won without even counting the real congestion zones east of Burnaby and south of the Fraser.

Two days earlier, a two-year-old group of frustrated volunteers known as the Sustainable Transportation Coalition (STC) was meeting downtown in a boardroom donated by the Fraser Basin Council, over our brown bag lunches, with no budget, no staff and faint hope.

SFU City Program Director Gordon Priceai??i??s blunt assessment from his July 3 BIV column (ai???Transit integral to building transportation bridges ai??i?? issue 1184; July 3-9) hung in the air: ai???TransLink has no more money. Gas-tax revenue is down, thereai??i??s no new source of funding from the province, no more property tax from the municipalities and not even approval for an anticipated fare increase. Expansion plans for already-promised transit are all off the table.ai???

Bizarrely, signs on Highway 1 still proudly announce what is not going to happen: ai???New RapidBus BC Service, Park and Rideai??? on the new Port Mann Bridge. There will soon be 30 vehicle lanes across the Fraser and not one lane of transit.

Richard Walton, Mayorsai??i?? Council chairman and North Vancouver District mayor, told us at the STC meeting nothing will break the impasse until a regional road pricing strategy can be approved that has political support in Surrey. So we took what comfort we could in enlisting our coalition members to support the student-led ai???Get On Boardai??? campaign for the fall, with a rally, social media and MLA campaigning.

Meanwhile in Toronto, the GTCAAai??i??s first wave of Regional Transportation Champions rolled out: a former federal cabinet minister, senior bankers and insurance executives, trade union leaders, president of the airport authority, religious leaders, president of the World Wildlife Fund, presidents of Oxford Properties and Cadillac Fairview, president of the University of Toronto, the CEO of YWCA Canada, president of the board of trade and many others.

It is astounding that so few people at that level here have grasped the impact of TransLinkai??i??s kneecapped funding for our region. The war against the bus has been won. The surrender to car-dependency and congestion and economic distress is complete. We are all casualties.

While Toronto mobilizes, Vancouver business leaders shrug and slip away to the beach.

http://www.biv.com/article/20120731/BIV0319/307319831/toronto-transit-on-the-right-road-vancouver-8217-s-hits-dead-end?utm_source=BIV+Daily&utm_campaign=c9f9897858-Daily_Wednesday_August_18_1_2012&utm_medium=email

Comments

2 Responses to “War on Buses? Er…No, Just Very Bad Planning”
  1. eric chris says:

    Both Gordon Price and Peter Ladner (former Vancouver councillors) to say it nicely are really really stupid.

    There are no real pass-ups on the B-Line route. There are over exaggerated delays of two minutes until the next “empty B-Line” shows up and ~50% of the B-Lines are totally empty during rush hours in the morning (deadheading east due to the express operation of the “bees” every two minutes).

    TransLink is dumping riders from two SkyTrains at Commercial and the Canada Line at Cambie onto the B-Lines. TransLink only has to cancel the express B-Line service to put more users onto the buses heading down 4th Avenue and 16 Avenue to curb the over crowding on transit to UBC.

    Without the express “bees”, travel times on transit to UBC would be essentially the same – traffic lights stop the “bees” every few blocks, presently.

    All the No.9 trolley buses (same route as the B-Line route) heading west of Arbutus are almost completely vacant because TransLink is operating the No. 9 trolley buses sparingly to force riders onto the B-Lines (No. 9 trolley buses stop operating at 6:30 pm on weekdays and don’t operate on weekends or go to UBC at all over the summer).

    TransLink can easily fix the B-Line problem by making all 13 routes to UBC operate at the same frequency so that 75% of the seats on the buses going to UBC aren’t empty as they are now.

    I have many adjectives to describe Peter the tool and Gordon the dope. I’ll just say no more, instead.

  2. Haveacow says:

    I have always been surprized by people and their wants and needs regarding transit as well as the actual service that transit operators and the political masters provide. Now I can honestly say by seeing from the inside it is often cost that limits what people really get. However, growing up in T.O. I understood that the problem of money which has been a cronic problem in Toronto since 1980 is made worse by political expiedency. That year the province and then Metro Toronto gave up on the 1 new station a year building program for the subway. However, there is also the political rot that set in as well. I noticed after the recession of the early 1980’s that politicians in Ontario local and provincial no longer talked about new transit but maximising the existing system.

    Today as an adult (I try not to feel like one anyway) the polticians in Toronto and the public have gone back to the mentality of build at all costs but I see why certain politicians and members of the public resist it. Decisions made by civic polticians to help cycling and pedestrians over car use has made clear that the old edict of 70% of the transportation budget needs to be roads is over as well as the old culturial institutions that gave us the modern suburb is changing as well. These people now no longer recognise the world they live in and they are scared and do not see a transit city as a positive step forward. They are mad and confused and then Rob Ford appears as a last chance to get back the lifestyle that they use to know. The calamity that has been that administration is on record and I wont repeat it

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