An overview of Quebec City’s proposed new tramway, something all out civic and provincial politicians should see.
In the new design for Quebec City’s tramway network, northbound vehicular traffic will be redirected, leaving more space for pedestrians on De la Couronne Street. (Ville du Québec)
My name is (name withheld by request) and I have been involved with transit issues in the lower mainland for four decades. I have been a forty year member of the Light Rail Transit Association and through my long membership, I have been advised by transit experts, both in Canada, the USA and abroad. I am the person responsible for the Leewood Study, an independent study by Leewood Projects UK, about the viability of reinstating the former Vancouver to Chilliwack interurban service with modern TramTrain or light diesel multiple units, on behalf of the Rail for the Valley group.
The Lower mainland has a glaringly expensive transit problem; Metro Vancouver mayors, the province and TransLink have approved spending around $11 billion dollars, extending the Expo and Millennium Light-Metro lines 21.7 km.
Is this a good investment of tax dollars or are the regional civic and provincial politicians condemning the region to a very expensive, yet obsolete regional rail system by doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for different results.
This massive expenditure, extending the Millennium and Expo Lines a mere 21.7 km will attract little new ridership because there will be little or no improvement for the transit customer, despite the promises of TransLink and the bellicose claims by politicians.
The $2.8 billion, 5.7 km Broadway subway, is literally a subway to nowhere. The terminus for the subway at Arbutus can be traced to the early 1990’s Broadway – Lougheed Light Rail Project, where Arbutus was seen to connect to future LRT operating on the Arbutus Corridor. Subways have proven to be little incentive for transit customers and a major inconvenience in forced transfers from bus to subway, means many former transit customers may opt for the car instead.
Subways are very poor in attracting new ridership, especially subways to nowhere.
In Surrey, former Premier Horgan’s recent political promise to extend the Expo Line to Langley, has grave financial implications, akin to the FastFerry fiasco, which has followed the NDP as an Albatross around its political neck, for two and half decades. Simply, the Millennium Line extension to Langley has become far too costly, for what good it will do.
This possible $5 billion investment for 16 km of new line, confirms Bent Flyvberg’s Iron Law of Mega-projects specifically addresses why politicians are obsessed with infrastructure at any cost.
…the “political sublime,” which here is understood as the rapture politicians get from building monuments to themselves and their causes. Mega-projects are manifest, garner attention, and lend an air of proactiveness to their promoters. Moreover, they are media magnets, which appeals to politicians who seem to enjoy few things better than the visibility they get from starting mega-projects. Except maybe cutting the ribbon of one in the company of royals or presidents, who are likely to be present lured by the unique monumental and historical import of many mega-projects. This is the type of public exposure that helps get politicians re-elected. They therefore actively seek it out.
It is time TransLink stops its deliberate game of confusion with Metro Vancouver’s light-metro system, which has led to decades ill-advised investments, which has cost the taxpayer many times more for the present light-metro system, than it should have.
Metro Vancouver’s regional light-metro system, is called SkyTrain and the SkyTrain light-metro system is made up of two distinct railways:
The Canada Line, a conventional railway, built as a light metro and uses ‘off the shelf’ Electrical Multiple Units (EMU’s) currently supplied by ROTEM of Korea. As built, the Canada Line, with 40 metre to 50 metre station platforms, has limited its maximum capacity to around 9,000 persons per hour per direction. A two car train-set is 41 metres long.
The Expo and Millennium Lines operate an unconventional, proprietary and often renamed light-metro system, now called Movia Automatic Light Metro (MALM), whose cars are only supplied by Alstom. Alstom has purchased Bombardier’s rail division, earlier this year. No other car manufacturer has an “off the shelf” operating vehicle, let alone a production line for such a vehicle, thus the transit system is deemed proprietary as there is only one supplier.
The SkyTrain Light-metro System to scale, including station platform lengths.
The MALM system uses linear induction motors (LIM’s) and is not compatible in operation with any other railway except its small family of seven systems.
The five previous names for MALM are, in descending order (owner of the proprietary railway in parenthesis).
Innovia Light Metro (Bombardier)
Advanced Rapid Transit (Bombardier)
Advanced Light Metro (Lavalin)
Advanced Light Rail Transit (the Urban Transportation Development Company)
Intermediate Capacity Transit System (the Urban Transportation Development Company)
The six other operating authorities, operating MALM systems are either abandoning operation when the cars’ have become “life expired” or have signaled they are not going to expand their systems, leaving Vancouver the sole customer for MALM.
A technology bias exists at TransLink. Internationally the MALM system is considered long obsolete as it costs more to build, operate and maintain than conventional light rail or even a heavy rail metro. Cities that built light-metro, such as Ottawa and Seattle, use light rail vehicles, as they are much cheaper to operate and far more flexible in operation, especially for future expansion.
TransLink continues to use this cunning method of manipulating analysis to justify SkyTrain in corridor after corridor, and thus succeeds in keeping its proprietary rail system expanding.
Gerald Fox, Noted American engineer, retired.
TransLink’s well oiled propaganda machine, churning out ”fake news” and “alternative facts” has created the local SkyTrain myth. The SkyTrain myth has fuelled the SkyTrain Lobby, which repeats TransLink’s fake news so much that politicians and the public have come to believe the SkyTrain myth.
The Broadway subway is testament to the power of the SkyTrain myth. Funding for the $2.83 billion Broadway subway has been approved, yet its foundation is one of half truths and questionable planning.
The North American Standard for building a subway is a transit route with traffic flows in excess of 15,000 persons per hour per direction (pphpd), yet peak traffic flows on the 99B Line is about 2,000 pphpd, based on 3 minute, peak hour headway’s. Maximum transit flows on Broadway are less than 4,000 persons per hour per direction!
TransLink’s two top planners were fired for their opposition to the subway, by publicly stating the obvious; that there wasn’t the ridership on Broadway to justify an almost $3 billion subway.
TransLink quite happily lets people believe that Broadway is the “most heavily used transit route in Canada“, but instead claims “This is our region’s most overcrowded bus route.”, when there is a threat of professional or legal accountability.
“The problem with TransLink is that you can never believe what it says; TransLink never produces a report based on the same set of assumptions.”
Former West Vancouver Clr. Victor Durman, Chair of the GVRD (now METRO) Finance Committee.
The former Mayor of Surrey’s flip flop from LRT to SkyTrain was also predictable, as the bureaucrats at TransLink did their best to ensure this would happen.
The well oiled SkyTrain Lobby was in full force with every bit of classic fake news and alternative facts they could muster, yet ignored the fact that MALM is now considered obsolete internationally and only seven such systems have been built in over forty years and no sales for the past 18 years!
The former Mayor of Surrey’s election claim that a SkyTrain extension from King George station to Langley City could be completed for $1.65 billion, was later exposed to be false, yet the Mayor’s Council on Transit, the Minister of Transportation took no action!
The fix was in!
The $1.65 billion figure pales when compared to the present estimate of $4.6 billion to $5.1 billion.
The cost of the Surrey/Langley/Line is so expensive that the provincial government has broken the one project into two projects in an attempt to hide the true cost.
The guideway project, with a cost estimate now of $4.1 billion.
The Operations and Maintenance Centre #5 project, which must be completed before the line can enter into revenue operation, is now estimated to cost $500 million to $1 billion on top of the now estimated $4.1 billion for the guideway! The stated costs do not include the costs for new vehicles.
TransLink, the provincial and federal governments stay mute on the true costs of extending the SkyTrain light-metro system.
With the NDP promising to complete the proprietary MALM railway to Langley, a very costly issue arises.
The aging Expo line is desperately in need of a major rehab. This rehab includes a major overhaul and expanded electrical supply; a new automatic train control system, all the switches being replaced on both the Expo and Millennium Lines to permit faster operation and all stations must be rebuilt to deal with the higher customer flows which come with a higher capacity. The rehab is said to cost between $2 billion to $3 billion and must be done before any extension to Langley is built. TransLink has already signed a $1.47 billion resignalling contract with Thales, leaving the necessary and much needed electrical rehab and upgrades waiting for future funding. The cost also does not include station rebuilding, nor vehicle purchases.
When the driverless SkyTrain breaks down.
The combined annual operating costs for the Broadway subway and the full Expo Line to Langley will exceed $70 million annually. Will this cost be taken from the regional bus system, to pay for two very questionable and politically frivolous transit projects?
If taxes are not greatly increased, this will certainly happen.
How is this to be funded?
Is a $4.6 to $5.1 billion expanding MALM 16km a good investment, especially when ridership on opening day, according to Translink, will be less than what the Broadway 99 B Line bus carried pre Covid?
By comparison, 2022 cost for The Rail for the Valley’s Leewood Study, for a 130 km, Vancouver to Chilliwack passenger service, using the BC Electric rail line, servicing North Delta, Cloverdale, Langley, Abbotsford, Sardis and Chilliwack and connecting the many business parks, universities and colleges along the route, would cost $1.5 billion.
TransLink does not support the Leewood Study’s Vancouver to Chilliwack rail service because it would outperform their $4.6 to $5.1 billion, 16 km extension to the Expo and Millennium Lines and very embarrassing questions would be asked.
“But, eventually, Vancouver will need to adopt lower-cost LRT in its lesser corridors, or else limit the extent of its rail system. And that seems to make some TransLink people very nervous.”
Gerald Fox
With the Covid-19 emergency now waning and major demographic changes taking place, a major rethink must be done on how we provide an affordable regional rail system. Metro Vancouver’s light-metro system has been well studied, yet those cities who have done so, have invested in light rail instead!
Why, after four decades of unprecedented investment in regional rail transit, has no one copied Vancouver’s light metro system, including the exclusive use of the proprietary MALM system?
Of the seven of the now called MALM systems built in the past forty years, Toronto is soon tearing down their version of MALM and Detroit’s version will soon follow, as both systems’ infrastructure are near being “life expired”.
Two of the later versions of MALM, marketed at the time as Advanced Rapid Transit (ART) built in Malaysia and Korea have embroiled both the patent holders, SNC Lavalin and Bombardier in legal proceedings, including charges of bribery. For added insult, the American government refused to subsidize any ART system because it is overly expensive to build and operate and was poorly designed!
The Everline. The Korean government swore after the conclusion of its court case with Bombardier, they would never buy this or any other Bombardier product, ever again.
It is time to put an end to MALM expansion or the provincial government and current mayors, will become like Marley’s ghost, dragging an ever longer chain made of empty cash-boxes, IOU’s, red ink, bare pursesand increased taxes wrought in union made steel, election, after election for decades to come.
Remember the FastFerries?
Today, TransLink continues to be toxic with taxpayers and extending MALM to Langley or continuing the Broadway subway to UBC will make TransLink and all who supported the gold-plated extensions radioactive politically, on a Chernobyl scale.
For forty years regional and civic transportation planners and engineers have got it wrong. But, because of very good, publicly funded PR machines in Victoria, and local cities and municipalities, plus the lack of any honest reporting by the local media, regional politicians keep building with the obsolete light metro. Metro Vancouver’s SkyTrain light-metro system has convinced other cities to build with light rail because there is no real advantage with building the much more expensive light metro system.
It is time regional politicians rethink present regional rail transit planning, where today’s hugely expensive planning will exacerbate growing congestion and gridlock and certainly greatly increase already high taxes. The SkyTrain light metro system has become a politcal “tar-baby” and continues to be a showcase how Metro Vancouver’s regional transit planning has continued to get it wrong!
It is interesting how TransLink has used this cunning method of manipulating analysis to justify SkyTrain in corridor after corridor, and has thus succeeded in keeping its proprietary rail system expanding. In the US, all new transit projects that seek federal support are now subjected to scrutiny by a panel of transit peers, selected and monitored by the federal government, to ensure that projects are analyzed honestly, and the taxpayer interests are protected. No SkyTrain project has ever passed this scrutiny in the US.
Too many cooks spoil the broth and too many politicians spoil transit.
But there is one quote that leaves me puzzled:
The city chose an Alstom train with unproven technology that strained the limits of what an LRT system could do.
Light rail is anything but unproven, as it has been around in one form or another for about 125 years. The Citidis light rail vehicle family, which saw the first vehicles operate in 2006, now has well over 1,800 vehicles in operation in over 67 cities around the world! Also, the system is not LRT at all, rather a light-metro, with fully automatic operation, which as been around since the late 1960’s! There is nothing unproven at all.
Some historical context.
In September 2009, the City of Ottawa paid Siemens Canada Limited, PCL Constructors Canada Inc., Ottawa LRT Corp. and St. Lawrence Cement Inc. the sum of $36,718,500.00 in order to settle their lawsuit for the wrongful termination of a contract for the design, construction and maintenance of a light rail transit system in Ottawa.
The project consisted of 27 kms of electrified track, 21 specially designed and built vehicles, associated mechanical and electrical equipment and various buildings. Construction was to begin on October 15, 2006. The project was a public-private partnership between the Province of Ontario and the Government of Canada each agreeing to contribute $200 million in funding.
In October 2006, the Government of Canada announced that its funding contribution was conditional upon receiving a notice of support for the project from the newly elected City Council following the November 2006 municipal election. Following the municipal election, the newly elected council voted to change the scope of the project. The Federal and Provincial governments would not guarantee funding for the changed scope. In response, Ottawa terminated the contract on the basis that the condition precedent of funding from Provincial and Federal government had not been satisfied. The Project Agreement had limitation of liability clauses which purported to cap the plaintiff’s recovery at $2 million.
In June 2007, the plaintiffs commenced an action in Superior Court in Brampton, alleging fundamental breach and breach of the obligation to perform the Project Agreement in good faith. Brampton is the jurisdiction in which the lead plaintiffs were headquartered. In September 2008, the City of Ottawa’s motion for a change of venue from Brampton to Ottawa was dismissed. In September 2009 a settlement of the action was reached on the basis of a payment of $36, 718,500.00. Siemens Canada Limited, PCL Constructors and the Ottawa LRT Corp. were represented by McCarthy Tétrault LLP, Dean Novak, Siemens Canada Limited’s Assistant General Counsel, and Douglas Stollery, Q.C. General Counsel of PCL Constructors.
That’s right, Siemens was going to build a 27 km LRT system for $1 billion and a change of government changed it to a $2.1 billion 12.5 km light metro, using the proven
Alstom Citidis tram.
In the end, what did the inquiry do, except fuel the anti-LRT crowd (who do not know what LRT is) and ruin politcal careers. Will the inquiry improve the delivery of future transit projects or hinder, only time will tell.
‘Egregious violations of public trust’: LRT rushed into service, commission finds
‘Deliberate malfeasance is unacceptable in a public project,’ Justice William Hourigan writes in final report
The Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry has released its final report into the city’s problem-plagued LRT network, making more than 100 recommendations on how to repair ‘egregious violations of public trust.’ (Stu Mills/CBC)
Both city officials and the companies that built Ottawa’s troubled Confederation Line made “egregious” errors during the construction and testing of the $2.1-billion LRT — errors that raise questions about whether the city is fit to oversee such massive infrastructure projects, according to the final report from the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry.
The city and Rideau Transit Group (RTG), which includes SNC-Lavalin, ACS Infrastructure and Ellis Don, lost sight of the public interest in their race to finish the LRT, which was late by more than 15 months, according to the report.
It’s clear the Confederation Line “was rushed into service” by RTG, which was under financial pressure due to construction delays and political pressure from the city, says the report.
Justice William Hourigan, the inquiry’s commissioner, released his 664-page report, complete with 103 recommendations for how to prevent similar issues in the future, on Wednesday morning.
It’s the culmination of almost a year’s work by the commission, which received a million documents, interviewed more than 90 witnesses and heard from more than 40 of them during 19 days of public hearings this past summer.
In his conclusion, Hourigan wrote: “While human errors are understandable and expected, deliberate malfeasance is unacceptable in a public project. When participants deliberately mislead the public regarding the status of a public undertaking, they violate a fundamental obligation that underlies all public endeavours.”
Since its September 2019 launch, the Confederation Line has been hampered by a litany of problems: malfunctioning doors, flattened and cracked wheels, faulty overhead power lines and broken axles, to name just a few.
Hourigan said there were many issues that led to the wide array of problems, including a pair of derailments last year — one near Tremblay station shut down LRT for nearly two months.
However, he singled out two instances in the project “that stand out as egregious violations of public trust.”
Misleading timelines ‘unconscionable’
He blasted RTG and its construction arm, OLRT-C, for repeatedly giving the city completion dates that it knew were “entirely unrealistic.”
“It was unconscionable that RTG and its main sub-contractor knowingly gave the City inaccurate information about when they would finish building the LRT,” Hourigan wrote in his report, adding that the gambit failed on a commercial level and further strained RTG’s already tense relationship with the city.
Worse, said Hourigan, is that the public suffered from the repeated misinformation.
“The leadership at RTG and OLRT-C seemed to have given no thought to the fact that the provision of this misinformation adversely impacted the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The people of Ottawa trusted RTG and OLRT-C to be straight with the City and tell them honestly when the system would be ready.
“The Commission finds that RTG and OLRT-C betrayed that trust,” he wrote.
In a statement sent Wednesday night, RTG acknowledged the group and its subcontractors “have work to do to restore the public’s confidence” in the LRT.
RTG said it’s committed to working together with new Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, council and staff to address the issues raised.
“We have listened, engaged in, and taken this process very seriously,” reads the RTG statement.
Harsh words for former mayor, manager
Hourigan also had harsh words for both former city manager Steve Kanellakos, who resigned Monday, and former mayor Jim Watson for withholding information from the rest of council about the final testing phase of the Confederation Line, known as the trial running.
Council wasn’t told that the testing criteria for the LRT had been lowered to allow it to pass its final testing phase.
“This conduct irreparably compromised the legal oversight ability of Council and raises serious concerns about whether the City of Ottawa can properly complete significant infrastructure projects,” Hourigan wrote.
It also “prevented councillors from fulfilling their statutory duties to the people of Ottawa. Moreover, it is part of a concerning approach taken by senior City officials to control the narrative by the nondisclosure of vital information or outright misrepresentation,” he found.
“Worse, because the conduct was wilful and deliberate, it leads to serious concerns about the good faith of senior City staff and raises questions about where their loyalties lie.
“It is difficult to imagine the successful completion of any significant project while these attitudes prevail within the municipal government.”
He added there is no reason to believe the conduct during the trial running was an “aberration or that transparency has improved within the city.”
A litany of problems
Hourigan found that the Confederation Line’ problems were a consequence of myriad factors. Those include:
The city chose an Alstom train with unproven technology that strained the limits of what an LRT system could do.
RTG did not coordinate the work of its subcontractors and failed to ensure the integration of the various systems and components.
The relationship between the city and RTG became too adversarial, and Ottawa residents “face the spectre of a largely dysfunctional partnership operating and maintaining its light rail system for decades.”
The City rushed the LRT system into service before it was ready, largely due to political and public pressure.
RTG and its subcontractors did not provide adequate maintenance.
The recommendations also include that an independent monitor keep city council and the transit commission informed about ongoing changes and issues.
Hourigan also recommends that all levels of government examine whether a public-private-partnership (P3) contract model, used here for the first time ever in a transit project in Ontario, is appropriate.
Caution tape is strung up next to the site of an LRT train derailment on Ottawa’s Confederation Line on Sept. 19, 2021. A pair of major derailments last year contributed to the province’s decision to call a public inquiry. (Nicholas Cleroux/Radio-Canada)
Failure to collaborate
At a news conference Wednesday morning, Hourigan and the inquiry’s lawyers hammered home a key theme: that the city and RTG failed to work collaboratively, to the detriment of both the project and the residents of Ottawa.
“The people who live in this city, who visit it, deserve to have confidence that the LRT system is safe and that it will get them to where they need to go, on time, reliably, every time they get on the train,” said co-lead counsel Kate McGrann.
“People and entities engaged in public infrastructure projects like this must always, always always keep that public interest at the forefront of everything they do,” she said. “And that, as a guiding principle, was lacking at times — very key times — in this project.”
Provincial taxpayers deserve accountability for their money.
– Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney
McGrann said it was the commission’s hope that the 103 recommendations would not just ensure the existing LRT network runs smoothly, but also guide the line’s Stage 2 expansions.
The commission’s lawyers also criticized the city’s daily recaps, which were sent out during the 19 days of testimony, saying it was something they’d never seen before at a public inquiry.
“We need to return to accountability and transparency with the City of Ottawa, rather than information control and spin,” said co-lead counsel John Adair.
In a statement, Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney said the province would review the findings closely over the next few days.
“As a funding partner, provincial taxpayers deserve accountability for their money,” wrote Mulroney. “We will continue making sure that Ontario taxpayers and transit riders get the best value for their money possible.”
Both the PCs and the previous Liberal government invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the design and construction of both stages of the LRT network, as did the federal government.
Sutcliffe also vowed to improve transparency with city council and the finance and economic development committee when it came to providing updates on the Confederation Line’s performance.
“I came into this job with fresh eyes and an open mind on how best to get the LRT system back on track,” said Sutcliffe, who was elected mayor in October after Watson chose not to run.
Again, our friend, Mr. Cow’s comment is worthy of a post of its own.
To tunnel or not to tunnel: that is the question and tunneling or subway construction has become politcal and not technical issue.
In the late Victorian era, during the railway building boom, small railway companies almost went bankrupt building tunnels because it was thought at the time that a “real railway was not a real railway, unless it had a tunnel”. This lead to many railway tunnels built strictly for corporate prestige; very expensive corporate prestige.
The same is for subways today, where many subways, like the Broadway subway, are being built strictly for politcal prestige and to hell with the taxpayer!
The Broadway subway, built on a route with a fraction of the ridership that would demand a subway, is being built as a driver for land speculation and land development and that folks, in Metro Vancouver, is why rapid transit is built.
Costs are in $USD$
Yes, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA especially, are generally more expensive to build rapid transit in than Asia, and PARTS of Europe. This is because these other countries have lower cost structures, Finland comes to mind, due to government price controls on most items. Developing economies, combined with high local populations can drive down certain construction costs greatly.
The European Union mostly, has government and an international subsidy system in place, specifically to lower construction costs. Many of which you could not be used in Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand because they are outright illegal or would be considered highly prone to government or intergovernmental corruption and would most likely be interpreted as favoring already large, well connected international builders and engineering companies like, SNC Lavlin, Kewit and Bragados.
1. However, even Europe is now facing the same explosion of non construction related project cost increases that plague North Americans and Oceania projects. Europe is having to deal with huge insurance and legal cost increases, mainly due to the increased likelihood of using courts to slow large infrastructure projects, when the planning process fails too. An ageing workforce which means higher site and health injury costs. The huge increase in the cost of heavy construction equipment and its operations, like here in Canada, many European builders lease and don’t own their heavy equipment, which greatly increases equipment insurance and site insurance costs.
2. The system Europe had to control utility companies and their ancillary construction costs is braking down. Utility companies often force construction projects to over pay for updating sewer, water, cable and power lines, even on infrastructure outside of the construction zone. This is mainly due to industry privatization and their outright intransigence dealing with government construction projects around their utility infrastructure.
The US faces a big problem due to politics and the concentration of rapid transit projects in the same metropolitan areas, which are all growing. Not only are the projects that build tunnels, bridges and above grade viaducts for mainly heavy and light metros more expensive then building any rapid transit technology in physically segregated surface rights of way, keeping in mind that, tunnels , bridges and viaducts for LRT are expensive to construct as well. The number of easy to build rights of way for real BRT, LRT, Light Metros and Heavy Metros ars shrinking in number. For example, San Diego and Portland both early leaders in LRT are building far less because of the need to now upgrade older lines and all the cheap and easy to build in rights of way, are all gone. The low hanging fruit has all been picked.
Although not American, a graphic example, Manchester UK has built up an impressive and relatively inexpensive LRT network over the last 30 years (102 km’s worth) however, the last LRT system extension to one of Europe’s largest shopping malls, The Trafford Centre, was very expensive. This was because the surface extension had to travel above roads, bellow roads, beside roads, in the centre median of major roads and required significant sections of purchased private property because there were no more empty railway or former railway rights of way, to build on. This 5.6 km line was more expensive than the previous 2 projects, both of which, were significantly longer. This is why Manchester has been seriously investigating the Tram-Train concept (Light Rail Vehicles sharing the right of way on underused sections of mainline passenger and freight railway corridors). Something the area of Karlsruhe and Chemnitz Germany did very well and many other cities throughout Europe, are copying. A concept Zwei is a big supporter of.
The next problem is project concentration. There are 56 urban areas in the US with a population of greater than 1 million people and 81 urban areas with a population of greater than 750,000, according to the 2020 US Census. The vast majority (over 80%) of all real BRT, LRT, Light Metro, Heavy Metro and Regional Railway projects that were built in the U.S. for the last 15 years (the projects which cost the most), are in a small group of 14-18 metropolitan areas. BRT Lite, (express buses with nice bus stops) and the new Streetcar projects which generally all operate in mixed traffic, were not included.
Not only are these cities running out of cheap rights of way to build on, they represent a big proportion of the fastest-growing urban areas in the U.S. which means, these cities are by their very nature, are more expensive to build anything in. Most, not all of these cities are in states or metropolitan regions that are controlled by the Democratic Party, whom are far more likely than Republicans to significantly fund local transit operations and or build rapid transit of any kind. This is an enormous problem in the U.S., where entire transit operating budgets as well as rapid transit network construction projects, often can suddenly and or massively, get their funding cut because of a change in the controlling political party. This significantly drives up all costs. The results are predictable. Denver’s RTD, operates with a budget 2/3rd the size of Translink’s but serves a larger area and a population twice the size. There’s a reason most of Denver’s bus service, shuts down before 9 pm and that was before Covid 19. This is a terrible way to operate a transit system but they have no choice. Budget conscience people may applaud this but American cities are losing companies to Australian, Canadian and European cities simply because, they can’t get people to work before or past a certain times of the day, it’s costing real jobs. Locating a company in some massive suburban office park is becoming more difficult if the staff can’t get home by transit and must drive in or out of the office park for the majority of the day. It’s also more expensive for said company to have to maintain a huge parking lot or enormous multi-level suburban parking garage, than to build a smaller lot or structure and connect to a rapid transit station.
As I mentioned before, many older LRT and Metro systems in the US have stopped or severely cut back new construction to fund maintenance and upgrades of existing lines. Both Canada’s as well as the U.S.’s transit capital funding systems doesn’t do upgrade/maintenance funding well. These upgrade projects, something the SkyTrain really desperately needs, more than SkyTrain line extensions or new line projects, are expensive and time consuming because you have to keep the existing system running, while your doing the work. Toronto had to choose between shutting down the busiest rapid transit line in Canada for 3 to 4 years or shutdown sections of the line on weekends for 7 years (while the rest of it operates). It turned out to be 9 years, to do upgrades to the signaling, cabling, power system as well as right of way repairs on Line #1. All of which, just finished. Now line #2 and line #4 need to be done. The longer you wait, the longer it takes to do and the more it costs.
The huge cost of tunneling for subway projects are barely mentioned in the media.
€4.4 billion for 6 km of twin bore tunnel and seven stations equals CAD $6.08 billion or CAD $1.o1 billion per km to build.
This should give pause for thought to BC and regional politicians that the high cost of subway construction will negatively impact other transportation projects in the province. with the 7 km plus Broadway subway, Arbutus to UBC section, yet to be built, one can estimate the cost in excess of CAD $7 billion!
Locally, $7 billion can buy the following:
A completely rebuilt E&N railway providing up to three trains per hour per direction, servicing Victoria to Port Alberni and Courtney.
A complete Leewood/RftV regional railway providing up to 3 trains per hour per direction, servicing Vancouver to Chilliwack.
A stand alone European style tramway, running from BCIT to UBC and Stanley Park.
Easily 400 km of rail transit, connecting scores of towns, major destinations and tourist attractions, as well as providing an attractive and affordable alternative to the car.
Today, subways are the “flavour of the month”. Politicians love them because they firmly believe that the more money one spends on transit, the better it is and big business loves them because they receive huge amounts of taxpayer;s monies to build them.
Yet, building subways, creates a politcal myopia for transit investment, because the huge costs means only a small length of subway is actually built and the only alternative is building new and bigger highways, bridges and tunnels to carry the traffic, which is exactly what is happening with highway 99 from the Oak Street Bridge to White Rock!
The huge cost of subways, which in turn grossly inflates the cost of ‘rail transit’ makes new highway construction the only alternative.
Toronto transit developer Metrolinx has awarded a €4.4bn privately-financed tunnelling contract to a joint venture of Ferrovial and Vinci Construction Grands Projets for the city’s Ontario Line mega project.
Set to last more than seven years (89 months), the JV will bore a 6km twin and build seven stations, six of them underground.
The JV is responsible for financing the work. Vinci said it has already mobilised credit from 11 banks.
Ferrovial said it was its construction division’s biggest ever project.
The Ontario Line will run 16km from Toronto’s southwestern downtown at Ontario Place to the Ontario Science Centre in the northeast. It will have a mix of overground and underground sections, and sections shared with other lines.
It is expected to carry up to 388,000 passengers a day and provide more than 40 connections to bus, streetcar, light-rail transit and regional rail services.
Elsewhere in Ontario, Vinci is working in a joint venture on a 28km extension of Ottawa’s Confederation Line.
The past few month, Zwei has been on the road, throughout the lower mainland attending rugby games (my son plays first div.) and has made a very depressing observation.
Despite over $30 billion invested or will be invested in the regional light metro system, traffic is getting worse and congestion, spiced with gridlock is endemic. It took me a the same amount of time to drive from Squamish to Cypress Bowl Road, in West Vancouver, to drive from Cypress Bowl Road to the 2nd Narrows Bridge!
In the Fraser Valley, Highway 1 is a shambles almost every day from Abbotsford to 200th Street in Langley.
Local roads are clogged with traffic and the buses, except for Vancouver proper, seem not well patronized.
Side streets are clogged with cars and parking has become the new cash cow for cities.
The following three question must be asked, by regional politicians:
Are we getting good value for money with our SkyTrain light metro system?
Has the SkyTrain light metro system created a modal shift from car to transit?
Is our regional transportation system user friendly?
The answers are not very politically palatable and TransLink is using every smokescreen, every ruse to hide the fact that the answers to the three questions is no.
This leaves an even more important question.
Will further investment in our regional light metro system improve regional transit?
The answer again is no as doing the same thing over and over again, ever hoping for different boarders on madness.
Rail for the Valley’s Leewood study gives some answers, with a Chilliwack to Vancouver, regional rail service, using the the former and still used BC electric interurban route, but it seems it is too simple and not expensive enough, $1.5 billion, to warrant politcal action. A modern regional rail service would not be a panacea but, it would give a credible and affordable option for people traveling between Vancouver and Chilliwack.
The evidence is in plain sight, yet many of our politicians remain blind, deaf and speechless and insist doing the same thing over and over again, because if anything, elevated SkyTrain or subways make damn good background for photo-ops at election time.
40 years of SkyTrain has not created a modal shift from car to transit.
By comparison the $2.7 billion, 3.5 mile (5.7 km) Broadway subway costs $772 million/mile and the $4.6 to $5.1 billion 10 mile (16 km) Surrey Langley SkyTrain will cost $467 million to $510 million/mile to build.
Oh yes, the estimated $1.5 billion 80 mile (130 km) Leewood/RftV regional railway connecting Vancouver to Chilliwack costs a mere $18.75 million/mile to build.
Something to think about.
From Mass Transit.
US: Why Are U.S. Transit Projects So Costly? This Group Is on the Case.
Nov. 2, 2022
For the last two years, a group of researchers at the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management has been building a big database of transit projects around the world. Their goal: To understand what drives the costs of transit project.
By Jared Brey
Source Governing (TNS)
Nov. 1—For the last two years, a group of researchers at the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management has been building a big database of public transit projects around the world. Their goal: To understand what drives the costs of transit projects, what makes some places more expensive than others, and how costs can be brought down.
The Transit Costs Project is led by Eric Goldwyn, an assistant professor and program director in the Transportation and Land Use Program at the NYU Marron Institute, along with research scholars Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, Marco Chitti and a group of international contributors. To date, the group has built a database with details on hundreds of projects, sourced from popular media, trade publications and official plans. And they’ve begun publishing in-depth case studies on a handful of individual cities, including projects in Boston and New York in the high-cost category, and Stockholm, Italy and Istanbul in the low-cost category, based on additional data gathering and hundreds of interviews.
This month, the Transit Costs Project is planning to publish an overview of its findings. Among them: The United States is the sixth most expensive country in the world when it comes to building rapid rail projects. The reasons why range from the politicization of project management to the expanding role of consultants, the costs of labor, and efforts to limit disruption to normal traffic flow during construction. In this Q&A, Goldwyn speaks with Governing about what makes transit building so expensive in the U.S., and what might be done to improve costs. The conversation has been edited.
Governing: Can you tell me briefly about this research group and why you started digging into this topic?
Eric Goldwyn: We’re all transport researchers and we’ve been following this stuff for years. We noticed that in America the costs seem to be higher than they are in other parts of the world. My colleague Alon, who has been collecting some of this data since 2008, started to see that U.S. projects across the board were more expensive. The first thing that we wanted to do was create a comprehensive database of these costs. Alon had been collecting a couple projects at a time and I had a database of probably 200 projects. So when we finally launched our project we hired some Chinese-speaking people and some people who can read Arabic: People who can cover a lot of places we couldn’t cover on our own.
Our database is now something like 900 projects in 58 or 59 countries. And, unsurprising to us, America has, I think, the sixth highest costs in the world. And it’s actually worse than that, because the thing that’s really expensive is building things underground versus at-grade or elevated. In the countries that are more expensive than the U.S., they’re building 65 percent or more of their projects underground, and in the U.S., we’re only building like 37 percent of our projects underground. So we’re choosing a less expensive method and we’re still very close to being the most expensive in the world.
Governing: So, at a broad level, why do costs matter? You mention that the U.S. is the sixth most expensive. Why shouldn’t it be?
Eric Goldwyn: If it costs $1 billion a mile or $2 billion a mile, depending on the city you live in, it’s very hard to scale at more than a mile or two at a time. It’s very hard to raise those sums of money to build something. If you’re moving toward a more global average of, say, $350 million to $400 million a mile, then a total of $4 billion or $5 billion can get you 10 or 12 miles of rail instead of 2 miles. All of a sudden that’s a big line. You can do a lot more with it.
I can give an example from our Boston case. We looked at the Green Line extension, and the plan in the earliest phases was to build seven stations, going up to Medford, Mass. And because the costs became so prohibitive, they just cut that last station and didn’t extend it all the way. That reduces the amount of access people have to transit. And that means people in that part of Medford are still more likely to drive. So from our perspective, if you want to be serious about getting people out of cars, you need to come up with a public transport system that provides anywhere-to-anywhere connectivity, and for bigger cities, subways are really good at that.
Governing: Is it also the case that high costs give opponents ammunition to oppose transit projects and turn political will against them?
Eric Goldwyn: In general, if you want to build confidence in public works, you have to be able to do them on schedule and on budget. And if those budgets are artificially inflated or veer dramatically from global averages or peer city averages — which they do in a lot of ways — it just begs the question of, what’s going on? I think people’s conclusions tend to be incompetence, corruption or a combination of the two. I’m not saying I agree with them. But that does not breed positive feelings for transit or public works in general.
Governing: One of the things that comes up in the reports is that politicization of decision-making at the micro-scale raises costs. Can you describe an example of how that works?
Eric Goldwyn: There are a couple different ways. If you look at Seattle, for instance, their board at Sound Transit is all elected officials. And they have to approve the decision to pick a locally preferred alternative. Building transit is sometimes controversial at a very local level. Some people maybe want the train to go here or there or don’t want it to cut through this or that sensitive area. So when you have elected officials who feel the heat on those things, they might say, you know, “Let’s study this alternative.” Or “Let’s not make a decision on this for another three months.” Or, “Let’s extend the comment period so people can air whatever they want to air.” You can look at the West Seattle and Ballard project — they’ve extended the comment period one or two times and they’ve postponed making a decision on the locally preferred alternative. That’s just kicking the can down the block.
To use simple numbers, if you have a $5 billion project and you assume 5 percent inflation per year, then every year you’re not making a decision, it costs $250 million. Every six months you’re not making a decision, it’s $125 million. So if you decide to study something for six more months, OK, we can do that, but you have to understand that’s going to add, at a minimum, $125 million to this project cost. It’s useful to understand some of those tradeoffs. Delaying something that you’re going to do, after you said you’re going to do it, comes at a cost.
The same is true of building an expensive station. In Boston, if they’d agreed to build cheaper stations from the outset, the money saved on building the six stations a little bit cheaper could have been used to build that seventh station. You could have had seven stations that are less ornate and less bespoke and customized, but, you know, it’s transit: You’re not supposed to stand there and gaze at the murals. You’re supposed to get on a train and get on with your life.
Governing: Is there a relationship between previous efforts to cut costs and the high costs we have now? One thing I was noticing in your reports was that the outsourcing of design and professional work can raise costs when public employees don’t have the in-house expertise to manage those projects.
Eric Goldwyn: Consultants are usually more expensive than in-house staff. And you need consultants for certain things. If you look at New York or Boston, you don’t need to have a station designer in-house because you don’t build that many stations. But oftentimes what we’ve found is that consultants are brought on to answer the questions of, what do we need to be doing? Rather than an agency telling the consultant what they need to be doing, the consultant starts to do stuff and the agency is like, “Well, that’s not really what we want. We need you to go study this other thing.” They’re billing you by the hour and those costs accumulate.
There was a light rail project in North Carolina that never advanced into getting federal money. Because this agency had never really built anything, they had to hire a consultant. They spent like $150 million just on the consultants doing the design work and the meetings. That’s $150 million that’s gone to nothing; the project is dead. In that example, what you would like to see is if the federal government had like a SWAT team of experts who could come in and help a city that is thinking about doing a light rail or a streetcar and has never done something like that before. In the Italian case that’s exactly what they’ve done. There’s a group in Milan called Metropolitana Milanese which has existed since the 1950s. They have built, planned and designed a 60- or 70-mile metro subway system. They’ve been hired out by other cities in Italy to help them with their planning and design work.
You’re always going to need to hire people to build this stuff, but some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do. These are somewhat standardized, off-the-shelf technologies. You’ve got to fit them into the city and there are unique quirks that need to be dealt with, from geology to utilities to property owners, but fundamentally it’s some track either buried in the ground, elevated, or underground. And the stations are just boxes with different flourishes.
Governing: You mentioned Milan. What are the commonalities, if there are any, in cities that have lower costs for these transit projects?
Eric Goldwyn: The one thing we see is a heavy emphasis on standardization of design and really trying to economize as much as possible. In Istanbul, they’re building something like 300 kilometers of subway. And they’ve been making changes and optimizing things as they go. They’ve learned lessons about how to build the most efficient station for their circumstance. Using different tunneling technologies, they’ve figured out ways to do less excavation but still create all the space they need for passengers and platforms.
In the U.S., where labor costs are quite high, wherever you can have a better interaction between time and labor, the cheaper a project is going to be. So if you’re doing something that is very time intensive, it’s going to be very expensive. If you’re building something large, it’s more time-intensive than something that’s small. And if you’re doing it with expensive labor, those things multiply.
Governing: How should officials approach the question of labor? People often don’t want to make labor cheaper because you don’t want to pay people less. There’s positive aspects of having high labor costs too.
Eric Goldwyn: One of the reasons we did our Stockholm case is that it’s a low-cost city, but their labor costs are very high. I think we figured out that their tunnel workers make basically the equivalent of $90,000 a year, and then double that in benefits. In this industry there are lots of labor-saving technologies, like tunnel-boring machines, for instance. But the way that our project agreements in the U.S. are often structured, they don’t really capture all of the benefits of that labor-saving technology. It’s not about paying people less. It’s about, don’t spend as many hours doing something, and don’t use as many people to do that thing. You know, I don’t want to work in a tunnel: Those people that do should get paid well and get good health benefits.
We also have very generous overtime, and that is not a common occurrence in other places we’ve looked at. In France it’s capped at 25-50 percent of the hourly rate, but you can only work 10 hours of overtime or something. In New York, if you work Saturday and Sunday, you get paid double time. If you work after the standard eight hours you get bumped up. And the way we do work, we only let them do work on some awkward hour on the weekend, so that means you’re automatically paying the double rate.
There are a lot of things that are very mundane and people wouldn’t think are that important, but if you don’t let a lane or two of traffic be shut down so they can dig a big hole, that just means they’re going to dig it much more slowly and they’re going to have to dig it at weird hours of the day, so it’s going to be much more expensive. If you just said, “yeah it’s going to be annoying, but let’s just do it and get it over with,” that would be, I would argue, a better way to go.
Governing: So what are the recommendations, and what levels of government should be implementing them?
Eric Goldwyn: At the federal level, it would be nice to see some sort of group of experts who have built mass transit work as a public-sector consultant. They could be hired out at a discounted rate by different municipalities or transit agencies.
At the top level, the politics in decision-making, we see that as the most important part of all this. We need to have champions in office who are cheerleading these projects. One of the things that’s interesting in this research is how often government agencies or utility companies gum up these projects because they want something. If you want to shut down a street to cut a hole and build your subway station, you need a department of transportation to approve that. But you’re most likely going to hit some sewer pipes or electric lines or whatever. So if you need to have those moved or power them down, you need to get the utility to sign off on that. Getting all those people to agree is not easy. Sometimes they’ll say, “We’ll do it, but you have to give us new pipes, or you have to replace a mile in each direction.” There’s all these opportunities for extraction, and there needs to be someone at a high enough power, like a mayor, who is saying, “Cut the crap. We need to get this done. They’ll replace whatever it is that they’re taking out but they’re not going to do extra stuff.” You can’t keep trying to extract more and more bribes from these megaprojects.
We also argue a lot in favor of making things transparent in terms of costs. One of the big things that they did in Italy to combat increasing costs from corruption — they had a big corruption scandal in the 1980s — was making what’s known as reference prices. This is what it costs to pour a cubic yard of concrete, what it costs to build a mile of embedded track, and so on. Because that information is public it has this two-way effect. The contractors now know this is what we can build to, and the public knows and the agency knows that when they get in a bid and it looks very different from these numbers, something must be up. That transparency, we think, is really quite useful.
Governing: Can politicians depoliticize things?
Eric Goldwyn: Well, it’s not that exactly. You want it to be more politicized in some sense, because you want people to say this is important and we care about this. And you want them to say that continuously. You don’t want them to say it once and then give up on the project, because that’s often what happens. But you don’t want them meddling into the project. What you want is a governor who is like, “Yes, I approve the spending on this, it achieves the goals I want to achieve. You, the technical experts, are empowered to figure out how to get there.” You want someone who will macromanage, not someone who will micromanage.
It all comes down to having people at the top that are like, “it’s important that we build this thing in a cost-effective, speedy fashion.” If you have a governor, mayor, head of agency who is laser-focused on that stuff, it solves all of these downstream problems. Because they won’t tolerate the operating agency saying they need to build all this other stuff. At the political level it’s got to be a recognition that our costs are whacky and we have to get a grip on some of this stuff if we’re serious about building transit and decarbonizing the transport system and, from my perspective, building better cities.
Sadly, the same is true in BC and Canada, where politicians fully believe the more money one spends on transit, the better is is.
We are currently spending around $11 billion to extend the SkyTrain light metro system a mere 21.7 km.
Current Cost Estimates:
Surrey Langley SkyTrain – $4.6 billion to $5.1 billion
Broadway subway – $2.7 billion to $3 billion+
Mid life rehab of Expo Line – $3 billion (More than $1.5 billion already spent, if one includes station rebuilding with longer platforms for 5 car trains)
(Needs to be completed before full operation can commence on the SLS and subway)
Total – $10.3 billion to $11.1 billion
Is this good value for money or would the following be a better investment?
RftV – Leewood Vancouver to Chilliwack passenger service – $1.5 billion
A BCIT to UBC/Stanley Park European style tram. $2 billion
A new multi track Fraser River rail bridge – $1.5 billion
A rebuilt E&N railway, offering the same service as the RftV/Leewood Plan $2 billion to $3 billion.
Each one of the aforementioned projects, would greatly benefit the region/province. A combined cost estimate of $7 to $8 billion, for over 400 km of rail transit would leave around $2 to $3 billion to be spent on other transit investments in the province.
The region and province still adhere to the tired old doctrine of investing billions of dollars on a grossly over engineered and hugely expensive, yet obsolete proprietary light metro system, which in the end does little to improve transit or mitigate the emissions of harmful pollutants that add to global Warming and climate change.
But ……. it certainty helps winning votes at election time!
NSW megaprojects are being over-engineered with tonnes of unnecessary, costly materials driving up the price and carbon footprint of the multibillion-dollar builds, Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes has warned.
Stokes said NSW would fail to reach its goal of a net zero economy by 2050 without addressing overservicing in its $110-billion infrastructure pipeline, where concrete and steel are being superfluously added to projects.
NSW Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes says the state must rethink how it approaches large infrastructure projects.Credit:Rhett Wyman
Carbon emissions from construction material – including concrete and steel – are estimated to represent up to 10 per cent of Australia’s carbon output. A new report produced by Stokes and Infrastructure NSW has flagged including those emissions in the business cases of future projects.
“We want things to be robust and well-built, but that shouldn’t mean just throwing more concrete and steel into our bridges, roads and railways,” Stokes told the Herald.
“There is an irony here. Because we’ve got very conservative design standards we’re actually putting more concrete and steel into roads and bridges and railways than anyone else in the world.”
Stokes pointed to the recent construction of the multibillion-dollar Metro rail lines as an example of a project that could have used less material without impacting design integrity.
Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes says some Metro stations may have been over-engineered. Credit:Wolter Peeters
“I think there is a general awareness that we have been very conservative and over-designed some of our station boxes on Metro lines,” he said.
The government is spending tens of billions of dollars on the Metro, which will connect the CBD to the west and south-west of the city, as well as a line to service the new Western Sydney Airport when it opens in 2026. The projects have been hampered by cost blowouts.
Station boxes are excavated for underground platforms, concourses and facilities, while major developments are often installed above them.
Stokes said a “compliance culture” in NSW had led to an intense focus on mitigating risk and liability in both the government and private sectors.
“I think every engineer that touches a project on the way through … just wants to ensure that their responsibility is entirely mitigated by throwing a bit of extra concrete and steel at it,” he said.
“The sum total of all these little decisions where people are just effectively covering their back means that we’re paying way over the odds, and also contributing toward global climate emissions because of our innate design conservatism, so we need to challenge that.”
The senior minister, who will retire from politics at the next state election, said that more thoughtfully designing the state’s largest projects would cut emissions, save time and taxpayer cash.
“We should be very proud of the fact that we are designing very, very robust structures, but the question we need to ask is, ‘Are we over designing them?’. There’s a cost imperative to that for the taxpayer,” he said.
“But there’s also a climate imperative because every bit of extra design constraint that adds to the bulk of a structure is making it more carbon intensive.”
The Infrastructure NSW discussion paper, set to be released this week, recommends a whole of government approach to measuring emissions in infrastructure.
The Decarbonising Infrastructure Delivery report says multibillion-dollar investment decisions were being made without any understanding of carbon mitigation or management over the life of the asset. It warns that could result in potentially higher costs to retrofit projects to achieve net-zero in the future.
The report also recommends maximising the use of recycled material in building.
The United Kingdom, including the Glasgow Airport Investment Area, and Europe are cited as examples of governments including the carbon impact of projects when weighing up their benefits and cost.
The government paper follows a report produced by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia which earlier this year called for ambitious, lower-carbon outcome requirements in major projects.
Stokes said future state governments would need to rethink the way they approached big projects, and instead start by questioning whether they should even go ahead at all.
“One of the very best ways we can decarbonise infrastructure is actually asking whether we need such an expensive megaproject design intervention in the first place. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the same objective,” he said.
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We should have listened to the experts in the 1980’s when the then social Credit government forced ALRT onto the regions regional transit planning.
We should have listened again to American Transit Expert, Gerald Fox in 2008.
The Evergreen Line Report made me curious as to how TransLink could justify continuing to expand SkyTrain, when the rest of the world is building LRT. So I went back and read the alleged Business Case (BC) report in a little more detail. I found several instances where the analysis had made assumptions that were inaccurate, or had been manipulated to make the case for SkyTrain. If the underlying assumptions are inaccurate, the conclusions may be so too.
We should have listened to the 62% of those voting against TransLink’s transit plans in the 2015 plebiscite.
$11 billion needed to build a mere 21.7 km of SkyTrain light metro should be setting off major alarm bells in Metro Vancouver and Victoria, but those alarm bells have stayed quiet.
You don’t meet people of substance here. You meet flakes. The press is dominated by yellow journalism. Rarely if ever have I read a real piece of investigative journalism. You do not meet people who form their opinions based upon facts. When you encounter Vancouverites and engage them in the discussion of social issues the argument usually become circular and they end of talking only about themselves. There is a kind of deep insecurity that comes from profound feeling of self loathing that is hard wired into the political culture here. Narcissism is the dominate religion and worshiping at the Temple of Mammon; real estate speculation is the Holy Grail.
We must listen to the experts today, as the alternative is more highways, more cars, more gridlock and more pollution.
Hundreds of thousands of trips are taken on Metro Vancouver’s buses and trains every day, but are enough commuters able to get to where they really need to go?
After the civic elections, TransLink is getting a new Mayors’ Council this fall and one expert believes the transit authority and its leaders need to start steering transit development toward change.
“I’ve long argued it’s well past time to do that because our transit model is not suited for the way the region is growing,” Patrick Condon with the Urban Design Program at the University of British Columbia said. “Most of the job growth is not in downtown Vancouver, it’s throughout the region, and it’s very dispersed in many, many locations.”
Condon says the current hub-and-spoke model presumes that all the jobs are downtown and all the workers live in the suburbs, but it’s no longer the case that all roads lead to Vancouver.
“We committed to the SkyTrain system in the 1980s and we seem very reluctant to move away from it into a system that’s much more affordable and much more capable of serving a distributed region with a distributed system of transit,” he told CityNews.
He says surface light rail and express buses are much more affordable ways to move people than using an elevated or underground SkyTrain system, particularly the “fantastically expensive” Broadway subway line currently under construction in Vancouver.
“The problem [with the SkyTrain] is, because of its nature, it can never serve, within reasonable distance, everybody in the region. It’s impossible to serve everybody with such an expensive system. There are much more affordable systems that can reach closer to people’s homes and can bring them to where they want to go if it’s not downtown Vancouver.”
Condon points to the “political brouhaha” in Surrey as an example.
“When Doug McCallum regained the mayoral seat four years ago, he immediately switched away from a completely funded light rail system that was going to serve Guildford, downtown Surrey and Newton, preferring to extend SkyTrain out to Langley without the funding. And they still don’t have the money to go out to Langley. It’s a terrible situation”
Condon argues the at-grade, light rapid transit plan would have served a denser population area, it was cheaper to build and it was fully funded.
“Now you have a situation, which I don’t think was fully recognized during the last election, where most of the job and housing growth are occurring south of the Fraser [River]. The City of Vancouver has a population growth of less than one per cent over the past couple of years whereas, when you get south of the Fraser, it ranges from about 1.8 per cent in Surrey to over three per cent in Langley.”
The good news, according to Condon, is that the growing Lower Mainland is arranged along a corridor.
“It would be relatively easy to service this constellation of linear communities, from Surrey to Langley to Abbotsford to Chilliwack, with a reasonably inexpensive system that just connects the dots.”
That’s if we consider the region as a whole, beyond the Metro Vancouver area served by TransLink, he notes.
“We don’t really think about [the region past Langley] as part of our metropolitan area but it most certainly is and that’s where the growth is happening. And to extend a super expensive subway out to UBC on the premise we are going to add another couple hundred thousand people to Vancouver really defies the gravitational pull of where growth is going.”
The inaugural meeting of the next TransLink Mayor’s Council on regional Transportation is November 17th.
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