TransLink Useless?

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

After attending a large commercial event, the recurring complaint was how badly the were operated and how deaf TransLink was for change. As the annual event runs on the August long weekend, bus service to South Delta is minimal with a bus every 30 minutes, a very poor service by anyone’s standard.

Yet TransLink operates three bus services in South Delta on Sunday; the 609 Wally-Wagon,Ai?? (so named after former BC Attorney General, Wally Opal, who lived on the route and which is daughter used to get to high school, if she did not drive); the C-89, and the C-84, which also operate an hourly service on Sundays and holidays, and are noticeably unused. The three buses are nothing more than a phantom service, that carry virtually no one, yet still operate seven days a week.

Here lies TransLink’s problem, it doesn’t provide the transit the consumer wants, yet provides transit that the consumer doesn’t want. The result is easy to understand, transit is used by only those who do not have a choice in the matter.

TransLink has said that transit improvements for South Delta are a decade away, oh I can hardly wait, more buses, operating on routes that no one wants to use.

There is a transit service that the public does want and wants badly; the return of the South Delta to downtown Vancouver express buses that go straight to Vancouver and not force an unwanted transfer on the transit customer to continue his or hers journey into town. It is the one transit service that would attract new customers, but of course TransLink remains blind, deaf and dumb on the issue, as all new bus services are so designed to feed the Canada and SkyTrain Lines.

TransLink is fast becoming a dirty word for incompetence (example: David Berner’s Transclunk), stupidity, and arrogance and with calls from the South Fraser cities and municipalities to abandon TransLink and start anew, it seems TransLink’s time maybe drawing to an end. I predict thatAi?? TransLink, as we know it, will soon come to a sad end and the region will have a new South Fraser transit authority. This is not to say that a new South Fraser Transit Authority would be any better, but hopefully we could design such an authority to actually provide the transit what the transit consumer wants and no longer be held thrall to the notion that all buses lead to SkyTrain.

Change is needed, yet TransLink remains aloof to any real change and is now playing a very dangerous game by providing substandard transit, hopefully trying to convince the taxpayers to shell out more money to keep fat-cat bureaucrats up to date with their pension plans, oops, I meant transit planning.