Occupy TransLink and rid ourselves of the SkyTrain cult!
TransLink and SkyTrain in the news again.
I find it strange that the mainstream media has failed to tackle the ‘SkyTrain’ question and continue to blather on about the benefits of SkyTrain, when the rest of the world have found none!
The 34 year old proprietary SkyTrainAi??light-metro system has created it own operating philosophy in Vancouver, which rezoning and densifying properties along the line is more important than affordably moving people. This “faux” transit philosophy has been now taken up by local academics, who have made careers preaching densification to the masses, like ministers, preaching the gospel. The problem is, SkyTrain and light-metro are now a false religion, based on dated precepts and equally dated technology. Only Vancouver seems to have been seduced by the SkyTrain/light-metro cult.
Why?
When SkyTrain was first marketed in the late 70’s as ICTS or asAi??Intermediate Capacity Transit System, it was compared to the old Toronto PCC style streetcars, not modern LRT. When compared to modern LRT, SkyTrain ICTS was not faster than LRT, nor had a higher capacity than LRT, but it certainly cost more to build and operate than modern LRT! There was noAi??market for SkyTrain and ICTS.
Rebranding as ALRT or Advanced Light Rail Transit, fooled no one, except BC provincial politicians were were sols a ‘bill of goods’ when they forced SkyTrain on the region.
The NDP’s flip-flop from LRT to SkyTrain was another crass political deal done between the new owners of SkyTrain, Bombardier Inc. and their new tarted up version called ART or Advanced Rapid Transit.
With only seven SkyTrain type operations in revenue service sinceAi?? the late 1970’s and all but two, Vancouver and Kuala Lumpor (which also has a conventional light-metro line and a monorail line), use SkyTrain ALRT/ART has urban transit systems, the rest are demonstration lines and specialty lines servicing airports or fun fairs.
As SkyTrain light-metro was an inferior product to modern light rail, the promoters of the system reinvented the transit system and created the SkyTrain myth. The myth included:
- SkyTrain was an automatic light metro and thus being driverless, was cheaper to operate.
- SkyTrain was faster than LRT, which will attract more ridership.
- SkyTrain has a higher capacity than LRT
- SkyTrain creates density, needed for the modern city.
- Light rail is dangerous because it operates on-street/at-grade.
- SkyTrain pays it operational costs.
The truth is a little different.
- Automatic operation doesn’t reduce operating costs of a transit system, except when traffic flows exceed about 20,000 persons per hour per direction. Instead of drivers on a transit system, the automatic metro has attendants. Automatic operation was designed to reduce signaling costs and increase signal reliabilityAi??on heavily used metro routes.
- There is absolutely no proof that the actual speed of a transit system influences ridership, rather it is the speed ofAi??one’s door to door journey time. As light metro networks are generallyAi??smaller than LRT, many customers must take a bus or other transit mode as part of their journey which increases transit time. A recent study dome in Copenhagen found that overall journey times on metro were 1% faster than light rail, but you got over six times more LRT for the cost of one metro line.
- The old saw that SkyTrain has a higher capacity than LRT should be finally put to rest, as a simple streetcar line in Karlsruhe Germany is on record having a capacity in excess than 40,000 pphpd or 10,000 pphpd more than the maximum theoretical capacity of the SkyTrain light metro system.
- Transit Oriented Development (TOD) follows every new transit line and it doesn’t matter if it is SkyTrain or LRT. Our local mania for massive high densities along our metro linesAi??tend to beAi??counter productive and seems more as a sop to developers to make huge profits by rezoning lands to higher densities and academics who seem to “not to get it”.
- Modern LRT is one of the safest transit modes today, to say it is dangerous is just pure folly.
- If we used the same accounting methods as TransLink does for SkyTrain, just about all light rail lines pay their operating costs, but TransLink doesn’t incl use debt servicing charges with their accounting methodsAi??and ignores the provinces now $250 million annual subsidy paid to SkyTrain.
In todays world, there is no financial or operational niche for SkyTrain as it costs more to build and more to operate than LRT, that TransLink still plans for SkyTrain and politicians still approve new SkyTrain lines only demonstrates how ignorant and unsuited regional, provincial and federal politicians are when involved in transit planning.
The occupy Vancouver types should occupy TransLink’s ‘Ivory towers’ on Kingsway, to try to bring about sane and affordable transit planning for the region.
Ai??Pricey SkyTrain love affair began in Ottawa
Ai??By Elizabeth James, Special to North Shore News
“Of course, taxing everyone a little bit is like putting the frog in the pot before turning up the heat – the mayors must hope the overtaxed and underserved don’t notice the slight increase in pain.”George Pajari,
VANCOUVER SUN, OCT. 14,
WEST Vancouver resident, high-tech entrepreneur and thorn in the side of council, George Pajari is not too pleased with the TransLink Mayors’ Council vote to approve a two-cents-a-litre gas tax.
Nor is he chuckling at the prospect of an annual $23 property tax hike which, of course, said mayors “hope to avoid.”
Wait till Pajari hears the numbers crunched by fellow thorn, North Vancouver’s Corrie Kost, namely that “the long-term debt of TransLink is about $1,000 per [Metro] resident.”
To emphasize, that is $1,000 over and above the costs of an Evergreen Line and the latest commitments made by your representatives.
Pajari suggests that “people who choose not to use transit” should be “penalized” with road and congestion taxes.
That is where he and I part company, because my position with respect to pouring more dollars down the black hole that is TransLink is this: Not a penny more until we are given two things: a new board of directors and an arms-length, pre-project, value-for-money audit.
Members of the new board must have professional transportation/transit experience, preferably untainted by ties to the federal and provincial governments, and have no current or past connections to companies like Bombardier and SNC-Lavalin.
Next, the audit must be performed by transit-savvy staff from the B.C. auditor general’s office, or similar professionals from the U.K. or Germany.
Why those caveats? Some of the most straightforward email conversations I have had about TransLink in recent months have been with Bowen Island councillor Peter Frinton, a member of the Mayors’ Council. Although he and I differ on some points – along with 15 others he voted for the recent gas tax package – never once has he given me political spin in answer to my questions. Some of his revelations about what passes for democratic process in this region are enough to send you to the drugstore for anti-nauseants.
Last July, after I suggested that if only TransLink would build at-grade systems instead of SkyTrain, most of its funding problems would disappear, Frinton replied, “Most of the mayors/councillors feel the same way, but have made no headway with the province or feds . . . I have no idea why senior government has been so married to [SkyTrain] technology. . . .”
Well, having asked myself the same question every time TransLink held its hand out, I am ready to take the gloves off on a possible answer: Someone somewhere has found it advantageous to choose proprietary SkyTrain over more affordable alternatives – and the beneficiary cannot be Bombardier alone because, as Frinton observed, the company also manufactures light-rail cars.
Nor, despite their recent vote, does it appear to be the yeasayers on the Mayors’ Council. The worst they are guilty of is not telling transportation minister Blair Lekstrom to take his dictates and pay for them.
No, although I have little doubt that some of the advantages have trickled down to a sequence of provincial governments, the TransLink buck stops in Ottawa. Also, because the question being asked has spanned at least 15 years of both Liberal and Conservative governments, whatever the advantages might be, they have been common to both.
Can it be that we pay through the nose merely to keep Quebec happy, or is the situation more sinister than that?
That there is an Ottawa connection seems obvious because, although the questions had their genesis in the mid-1980s when SkyTrain was chosen for the Expo Line, they gathered speed when former NDP premier Glen Clark abruptly changed his mind about using light-rail for the Millennium Line project.
The switch (pressure?) began after he visited Ottawa with Ken Dobell, a former Vancouver City manager under then-mayor Gordon Campbell. The rest is our very expensive TransLink history.
But no matter where the SkyTrain advantages originate, regional taxpayers are left paying for the mess because, as Frinton told me last March, “The provincial government has long attested that Lower Mainland municipalities have ‘property tax room’ as a result of lifting the hospital tax in our area.”
There is much more to tell and sooner or later that will happen. For now, and in support of the relatively few people who try to keep this issue in the public eye, all I will add is this: Rather than trying to Occupy Vancouver without really knowing why, what the protestors could do is start small – Occupy TransLink, deal with that well documented billion-dollar problem and, if that succeeds, move on from there. rimco@shaw.ca
Ai?? Copyright (c) North Shore News
I’ve been talking to the Vancouver protesters both in person and on Facebook.
I’ve been telling them to protest against all the boondoggle projects we have in BC, against tax guzzlers like TransLink, and against corporate lobbyists.
They don’t listen. Most of the more enthusiastic protesters seem to be clueless hippies more interested in demanding things like marijuana legalization and the abolition of money.
It’s a sorry situation.
I had to look up Karlsruhe to see what kind of simple street car system is pushing 40000pphpd down a track, and it doesn’t exist. What does exist is an extremely advanced and well developed Street Car, LRT, Passenger and “Stadtbahn”, which is Light Rail system with sections built to Metro standards in central and well used areas, and Tram ways where there is less use more area. It would appear your 40000pphpd is not a simple system, but one of the most well built, sought after systems in the world, which started by building segregated (in Karlsruhe’s case they shard a lot of freight railway/passenger railway lines), and that number is only attained where the lines from all the different systems come together, not the ENTIRE system.
So while Skytrains theoretical Capacity across the entire system is 30000pphpd, Karlsruhe’s is not. But using the same logic that creats Karlsruhe’s huge ridership capacity, Waterfront station could have a capacity Running nearly 50 000pphpd, assuming 30 000 for Skytrain, 15 000pphpd Canada line, 2400 Sea bus, and 2500 West Coast express (which could be upgraded to well beyond that if needed)
As a last note, Translink does suck, they need to be replaced, I agree with you there. And Karlsruhe’s system is amazing, I can only wish for something like that in Vancouver. Perhaps you should advocate for an electable Transportation Board, instead of a private company that sucks on the publics teat for more and more money.
I forgot to mention – Theoretical Capacity at Commercial-Broadway -> 60 000pphpd! WOW! Karlsruhe has nothing on us!
Really such nonsense, but then I see the SkyTrain trolls alive and well and in full swing. Maximum theoretical capacity of the Expo Line (8 car Mk.1 car trains and extended stations – cost, about $1 billion) 30,000 pphpd. Maximum capacity of the Expo Line, by contract, 15,000 pphpd.
Maximum design capacity of the Millennium Line, as advertised by Bombardier Inc., 26,000 pphpd.
Nowhere is there any capacity mentioned of 60,000 pphpd for the Broadway corridor, unless you design a metro with 10 car trains, operating at 2 minute headways – cost $350 million/km to $450 million/km.
I know Zwei, I’m just playing around,
My comment was more to the fact that if you add the theoretical capacities of BOTH lines at the Commercial-Broadway Station, then you can come up with fake numbers to back up a ridiculous position.
Can you please give me some more information on the Karlsruhe system, I’ve looked and looked but I cannot for the life of me find any English reports that justify your 40 000pphpd, and my German is a little non-existent.
Also, for some reason I took pphpd for People Per Hour per Day, not People Per Hour Per Direction, silly me, I have many excuses for the miss step but they don’t matter, I actually did know the true meaning but ignored it, my apologies.
And while I may support the extension of the Skytrain along Broadway, the SOF needs a LRT/TRAM type system to connect it to the Skytrain network. Richmond, Surrey and Langley and White Rock could benefit from this type of system to no end. But having Broadway be an extension of the M-line, while expensive, would offer reduced transit times by having less connections and would develop Loughheed highway through Burnaby to a density that would benefit the whole region, and Transit does need to promote density, that’s how green design works.
In Conclusion, MORE Karlsruhe information if you have it readily available, post it in reply post, I will check back for reply!
Thanks.
It was announced in the transit news last year, that the main tram line was being put into a subway because of the success of the regional tramtrain system, the main tram route through the city were seeing 45 second headways during peak hours.
Now the tramtrain GT-8 100 3-section articulated vehicles as well as classic Karlsruhe 3-section articulated trams have a capacity (all seats taken and standees a 4 persons per/m/2) of about 240 people. In peak hours, the trams are operated in two car trains, giving a train capacity of 480 persons (or more) per train, thus it is simple math to calculate the offered capacity of 43,000 (480 x 90 trains per hour per direction) pphpd.
Only Vancouver makes a big deal about capacity, trouble is, SkyTrain lags behind because it must adhere to its automatic (driverless) operation.
The problem in Karlsruhe was not the 45 second headways, rather the crush of people on the streets, using the tram line during peak hours. Many European tramway systems operate 30 second headways during peak times, that Translink claims this is impossible, yet we have ample examples of such operation, speaks volumes of Translink’s deliberate attempt to misinform the public.
The other interesting item about Karlsruhe’s new subway is that it wasn’t considered until ridership exceeded 40,000 pphpd, yet the powers that be deemed a capacity of about 5,000 pphpd demanded a subway for the Canada Line. Sad fact is the Canada line is horribly overbuilt for what it does, taking money away from other needy transit projects.