Aftert 17 Years & Over $8 billion Invested In Light-metro – Nothing changed
After 17 years of SkyTrain and or Canada Line investment,Ai??with well over $8 billion of taxpayers monies spent, there has been little change in the overall modal share.
TransLink, a firm believer that is something doesn’t work, do it again, continues with SkyTrain light-metro planning or light rail designed as a poor man’s SkyTrain,Ai??for the region. Instead of proven bold initiatives to provide the region with an affordable public transit alternative, we get threats and demands for more money, to hire more bureaucrats to do more questionable bad planning. The TransLink Board withAi??a collection of the most inept professionals, rubber-stamp TransLink’s monetary demands, not to improve transit rather to keep their lucrative stipends.
This fiasco called TransLink, where regional politicians play petty politics with transit and seem easilyAi??lead astray with offers of a BRT here or the hint of a SkyTrain subway there.
The mainstream media, who have long given TransLink a “free pass” with the ongoing ‘Monty Pythonesque’ style of operation, must awake out of their collective stupor and portray TransLink for what it is, an out of control bureaucracy that since its inception has done little or nothing for the region except become a black hole for the taxpayer’s money.
To date, only the Mayor of Delta has stood up to TransLink’s silly demands for a surcharge at park and rides.
http://www.cknw.com/news/vancouver/story.aspx?ID=1816254
The sorry state of TransLink has gone on too long and it is time regional politicians show some collective ‘spine‘ and tell the province to dump TransLink and start again. The TransLink model is broken and so is the transit system. The decades of doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same results must stop and an affordable regime of transit initiatives must be implemented.
We know Delta’s Mayor, “is not afraid to bell the cat“, do any other of the regional mayors have the “moral fortitude” to do so?
While TransLink views four more commuters out of 100 (since the formation of TransLink in 1999) as a huge victory (increase in modal share from 10% in 1999 to 14% in 2011) – it is really an abysmal failure by TransLink because the increase in transit use has “not been” through the reduction of drivers, it has been by increasing regional transit use with people who once walked or car pooled and who weren’t producing carbon emissions on transit. Trips by drivers have not changed and remain at 57%.
In other words, TransLink has increased carbon emissions by increasing transit use! While TransLink ranked dead last in Canada in a 2012 efficiency review by an independent consultant, the media are not writing about it:
http://translinkcommission.org/TransLink_Efficiency_Review_Mar_21-12_FINAL.pdf
Purported carbon emission reductions of SkyTrain by TransLink are a hoax and are largely offset by all the added diesel buses used to get people to the SkyTrain stations spaced well over two kilometres apart in distance. Unlike LRT, streetcar or tram lines taking buses off the roads, SkyTrain lines put buses on the roads (No. 15 shuttle-diesel buses along the RAV Line on Cambie Street, for instance) to increase transit costs, traffic congestion and carbon emissions.
Despite the rhetoric by TransLink of transit being for the people, TransLink is a scam and it is interested in one thing: money to pay the salaries of its buffoons who are making fools out of the adoring media who are too afraid to cut TransLink to pieces in the press. Hasta la vista, scum of the earth at TransLink, you are done and your days are numbered.
http://www.hark.com/clips/pvpgmnwflf-hasta-la-vista-baby