Fare Evasion Kool Aid – TransLink Again Bamboozles the Mainstream Media

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If weai??i??ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. Weai??i??re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. Itai??i??s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that weai??i??ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.ai???

Carl Sagan

Don’t the mainstream media get it? Obviously they don’t or they have been told not to; fare evasion is a problem on all public transit systems and the statistics I see points to the fact that TransLink’s fare evasion problems are just average.

Despite the fact that the provincial government quietly subsidizes the SkyTrain and Canada Lines by well over $300 million annually, or just the subsidy for the Expo line is much larger than the subsidy for all the trolley and diesel bus services offered by TransLink, the mainstream media has focused on fare evasion and nothing else.

In the Vancouver Province, John Ferry again regurgitates the fare evasion myth, that somehow all of TransLink’s financial ills would be cured if everyone just paid their correct fares.

http://www.theprovince.com/news/vancouver/hope+TransLink+finally+ready+listen/7510596/story.html

No mention at all about the U-Pass and that over use of the U-pass is causing full fare transit customers to return to the car or even that U-Pass fraud amount to well over $15 million in income. No, the U-pass is TransLink’s ‘golden child’, that can do no wrong, because it is not revenue that TransLink is really worried about, it is ridership numbers – the number of people using the bus and mini-metro system, that is important. IncreasingAi??theAi??ridership numbersAi??is important to TransLink because with higher reported ridership, TransLink can demand more tax money and more tax money means more bureaucrats for TransLink and ever higher stipends for TransLinks executives and of course higher taxes and user fees for the car driver.

The fare evasion hype and hoopla is a ruse to divert attention away from the real fiscal problems bedevilling TransLink and the big problem of course,Ai??are the very expensive SkyTrain and Canada Line light-metro systems.