SkyTrain & Canada Line Hubris At The Vancouver Sun
I see that the Vancouver Sun is continuing its propaganda campaign for the Canada Line with Saturday’s effort; “Future is bright for Cambie Corridor as development booms.”
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Stories/813152/story.html#ixzz29rcrw1OW
What the article boils down to, is that the Canada Line was never about moving the public, nor reducing auto use (remember the 200,000 car journeys taken off the road that was restated ad nauseum, by Gordon Campbell and Kevin Falcon?) No, the Canada line is all about real estate and for land developers to make very big bucks. The article is almost desperate; “buyers lining up…..”, etc., but little or no mention about the subway itself.
The claim of 124,000 passengers a day can be taken with a grain of salt, as TransLink has always overstated ridership and with the media absent from any investigative reporting, Translink could get away with the claim that; “the moon was made of cheese.” TransLink has no way of calculating ridership and deduces ridership by an arcane formula which includes the U-Pass, car loading numbers at key points, and guesstimates.
Another question no one wants answered is how many $1.00 a day U-Pass users use the Canada line and is it true that over 25,000 U-pass users use the Canada line more than twice a day or even more? If it is true, then the Canada line is hemorrhaging huge amounts of money!
Still, the claim of 124,000 passengers a day for the metro, is very weak for a metro, which means the taxpayer has to make up the slack with higher subsidies and user fees. Read road pricing.
Zwei has stopped taking the delivery of the Sun years ago and whenAi??I read pap like this, I know I made the right decision!
Hey,
You should add a facebook “like” button, or an easy way to share this stuff. Could increase readership quite a bit.
-Bob
Well said. Tram or LRT lines would be just as good at moving people down Cambie Street (better) and there would not be diesel buses operating on Cambie Street to shuttle riders to the distantly spaced “below grade” stations along the RAV Line, renamed to Canada Line by image conscious TransLink.
What patriotic Canadian would have anything negative to say about a line named after the country? It was a clever ploy by TransLink to rename the mostly despised RAV line which the mayors, if you recall, did not want built. The mayors preferred LRT and are bitter now about having to bail out TransLink with more taxes, hence the backlash by Mayor Corrigan and Mayor Jackson, in particular – when TransLink, Gordon Price and the TransLink stooge and Vancouver Sun reporter (Kelly Sinoski) began their fear mongering about how bad things could get without billions of dollars more to keep the ones who created the mess at TransLink employed.
TransLink already spends about $700 million annually too much (in relation to LRT elsewhere) to move the transit users that it does move, and you are right, it is elevated transit that is at the root cause of the financial meltdown at TransLink (especially the RAV Line costing $100 million annually in performance payments to SNC Lavalin and friends).
Kelly Sinoski like a good little mindless commie is just singing the party line at TransLink. Our remedy to the transit malaise which has afflicted Metro Vancouver is to have the municipalities take control of transit to build community based LRT or tram lines – it means firing everyone at TransLink to end the regional SkyTrain and rapid bus morass, and of course, TransLink along with TransLink CEO, Ian Jarvis, making almost $400,000 annually as an accountant with no special skills, over paid by $300,000 annually, does not like that idea.
Finally, TransLink is attempting to mislead the average reader who knows almost nothing about transit when it talks about the RAV Line moving 124,000 passengers (wrongly interpreted by many readers as people). Transit here moves on average (not working commuters which are 17% of all commuters) just 11% of the population (working and non-working) or 300,000 “people” on a working day and about 150,000 people on a holiday or Sunday, maybe. TransLink really means that the RAV Line moves 62,000 people on a work day (maybe) assuming that everyone makes only two passenger trips daily.
Many university students who make up a significant portion of transit users make far more than two trips daily. On average, the RAV Line moves fewer than 40,000 people daily and there are about 1.5 million people driving here. The RAV Line does nothing tangible to alleviate road congestion (reduces cars on the roads by possibly 2%) and as you rightfully say it is a tool for offshore developers to tear down homes to build condos for more immigration which Vancouver does not need.
Maybe what we really need is a “development tax” to get a handle on the road congestion created by too many people moving here when there are not enough jobs to support the hoards who end up working in minimum wage paying jobs and who put a strain on transit because they can’t afford a car and have to take transit everywhere. Maybe they might move where they might do some good – Edmonton or Calgary where there are jobs and where there is good transit system around LRT, already.
PS
Another great story of why transit will never attract the majority of people who can afford to stay off transit after they get a good paying job (what‘s another $300 monthly for a car when you are paying a $2,200 monthly mortgage for a one bedroom condo on the RAV Line, anyhow?):
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/10/20/bc-bus-assault.html
Some nut case assaulted a 41 year woman on a TransLink bus at 11 am on Thursday. Funny, the TransLink annual report never shows pictures of heroin addicts with needles sticking out of their arms on SkyTrain or of psychos bashing fellow passengers on buses, wonder why? Too raw and bad for business, I guess.
OK, I’ll end the rant and pick it up on another day.
I find the Vancouver situation most enlightening. First you build a tube line, then up-zone adjacent properties to much higher densities, in a faint hope that the new tenets will take the tube line from home to work or school or back; but what about elsewhere?
I find Google maps a most interesting tool and from what I can see, the various “El’s and tube lines do not seem to go anywhere but downtown Vancouver. This means very good transit if one happens to want to go downtown, but little else.
What I see in, not just Canada, but the USA a well, is that transit is built to solve a political issue and not transit issues. There are few exceptions to this, with Portland being one and even LA seems to understand the need for a transit network.
Vancouver, it seems, follows a beat of a different drum, and road pricing will not solve the fiscal dilemma that TransLink finds itself. Not when the folly of building more very expensive light-metro, which has proven to do no better in attracting new ridership than a much cheaper light rail alternative.
It seems Vancouver’s transit planners reside in the world of Ballistas and Trebuchets (both very effective in their day) when everyone else uses gunpowder and canon!