Wisdom From Ottawa
Our friend Haveacow, is a transit professional and his comment, I believe’ gets to core of TransLink’s woes. When you add in the extra costs of operating the Canada Line and SkyTrain ALRT/ICTS Lines, one can easily see why TransLink’s costs are a third higher than Edmonton and Calgary.
From Haveacow and please forward this to your mayor and council and provincial MLA’s.
Daryl Delay Cruz, I was told by my friend Scott who actually works for Translink that yes Zweiai??i??s numbers from CUTA are correct. Now before everyone goes all ai???rangyai??? as my wife says, please listen as to why the costs are so high. Remember this is conventional transit costs only, no rapid transit B routes or Skytrain are included. Translink through union agreements has to provide a certain amount of positions that are managerial in nature but are still frontline workers. They go by different names in different transit operations, but the term Driver Route Supervisor or Inspector is often used. Well you guys are loaded with them, he did not give exact numbers but it is about one third more than the national average (ironic isnai??i??t it). They are very expensive because they are all senior positions in the bus driver pay scale. Most are not even visible to the public because they work in your bus garages and depots (whatever you call them there).
Due to the way transit is provided in Vancouver through shell companies and divisions each company, division whatever you want to call it, seems to handle a different transit mode. Unfortunately that means that, each group has its own management and separate physical requirements and therefore very little effort to combine budgets to reduce duplication of certain services. They still have to pay their employees as well but, here you do have commonality with other divisions because of expensive union agreements. I am not against Unions they give workers a fighting chance but it does come at the cost of the public dime. Keep in mind it is actually quite difficult. to drive a bus when you are dealing with the public and bus mechanics are worth their weight gold. Very expensive to train and therefore very expensive to have on hand to fix your buses. Each division or company has to have its own instead of one pool of maintenance people which is what many other transit operations do. Scott (not his real name in case you didnai??i??t figure it out yet) also tells me that the dispatching of buses requires a high number of miles traveled ai???deadheadingai??? and this is the fall out from one group handling bus management. In these types of operations when someone contracts a single company to run all the buses mostly to save money, there is a desire to centralize the control and dispatching of said bus fleet, again to save money. What has often happened is that it actually is cheaper, to have multiple areas each with its own dispatching control because of the control issues and the inefficiency of providing centralized dispatching over a large geographic area. It seems counter intuitive but its often true and again Vancouver with heavily centralized dispatching system fails miserably here.
Lastly, when you have so many divisions handling individual operations, one company is just the buses and another just the Skytrain and so on, you get very poor internal communication. Unless you hardwired a system together that forces certain groups to talk to each other as a matter of operational need, the natural tendency is to stop communicating with each other, especially if problems occur. Think about it, you have a division that just operates the Skytrain network and the Canada Line but, the Canada Line is actually paid and administered through a private consortium. Regardless who physically. runs and staffs the Canada Line resources have to go to the consortium to set up some to administer their side of the agreement for the line. Now you have 2 groups doing administration duties and they are most likely not in the same building so emails, phone calls and text become there main form of communication with each other. Face it, this website shows just how difficult it is to communicate ideas even when there are only small disagreements between people let alone a massive complex agreement to administer.
@Haveacow,
Fantastic revelations from the “TransLink whistle blower – Scott”. Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, who is no fan of sky train, might one day become Premier to become the nemesis of the much despised TransLink here. My guess is that heads will roll at TransLink if she does become Premier.
For TransLink to operate diesel buses on the 99 B-Line route to displace trolleybuses is sacrilege. It warrants the dismissal of the individuals who are responsible at the City of Vancouver and TransLink.
Trolleybuses have a long term payback and are less expensive to operate over the long term when you look at both their capital and operating costs, but trolleybuses do have a short term capital cost premium (25% to 50% over the cost the diesel bus). TransLink is making poor long term transit decisions which save Ian Jarvis of TransLink money in the short term for him to make his bonus as CEO of TransLink for his “cost savings“.
When he is gone, the bills will come due and he’ll be laughing. Furthermore, he is spending on sky train knowing full well that it is foolish and is using the money of taxpayers to lobby in the media for funding for sky train.
From my experience in industry, the higher up in an organization, the more difficult it is to admit a mistake. It is an ego thing, and the more at risk in salary, the less likely you are to let people know that you aren’t perfect.
Everyone makes mistakes. Good people and corporations learn from their mistakes and correct them. They don’t lie to conceal mistakes. They don’t go after more funding for the sky train debacle to create additional and impossible to finance costs in sky train infrastructure in the future, for instance, as Ian Jarvis and friends are in Metro Vancouver.
My solution, fire Jarvis or send him to jail for his treachery to taxpayers. He is committing white collar crime and is essentially stealing from naïve taxpayers. We pay Jarvis $400,000 annually for his supposed exceptional intellect and we get betrayal in return?
He is an accountant making paper savings on the balance sheet while destroying the financial viability of transit here – we can‘t even afford trolleybuses for existing trolleybus routes anymore. At the same time, the health of residents being exposed to harmful particulate matter concentrations from the high frequency diesel buses on the UBC trolleybus routes is suffering. It makes me fume.
To be fair it is not his fault trolley buses are expensive, most North American bus producers don’t even make them anymore. The N. American bus producers who do as well as a few in Europe and S. America, must have large orders to drive down the per unit cost or they just will not get the price low enough for most users to purchase new units. It also doesn’t help when the Trolley Bus market keeps shrinking, as city after city decides to abandon their trolley bus network mainly due to the lack of maintenance on the wires and power delivery systems. This is on top of requiring 2 sets of wires when LRT /Streetcar require only 1 wire and new battery/power system technology may make the need for a overhead system of wires a lot smaller or may eliminate them altogether. I was talking to a gentleman recently at a model railway show who is now retired but used to work for a company that dropped trolley buses from their vehicle manufacturing lines. He said unless the order for vehicles was massive (300-500 units) the premium on costs compaired to standard diesel units was between 65-80% and 100-120% for articulated buses. Whin no orders approaching that size and customers unwilling to pay the massive premium per vehicle his company decided to end trolley bus manfacturing forever and concentrate on more standard products.
Zweisystem replies: Zwei was told by an European agent who sells trolleybuses, that in most cases, a “cheap” tram was about 30% more to install than an electric bus with about 100% more benefits. Trolleybuses are now a “niche” transit mode, used on transit routes that would be to expensive to build and operate with a tram.
Oh I really would not refer to Scott as a whistle blower, these really are just standard comments that anyone with experience in the management of large organizations commonly see. I am quite sure that no real evil was intended on anyone’s side of this debate Scott, or the management of Translink. When you have large complex organizations that handle large complex duties like the provision of a massive area wide transit service and the planning/maintenance of very key pieces of transports infrastructure you are likely to create many little money or resource sucking monsters. You just have to stay on top of them and not let them go for too long a time. If you don’t, they become ingrained or a central part of an organizations costs structure and then are quite painful to get rid of. This is what has happened here with Translink in my opinion. In an attempt to cut costs its quite easy for a large organization to find itself with a system that actually ends up creating a situation that actually incurs high costs.
Zweisystem replies: I think anyone who tells the truth or tells it as it is at TransLink is considered a whistle-blower!