Is There Already An Agreement to Build A SkyTrain Subway Under Broadway?
It seems Bombardier Inc. had designed a new Advanced Rapid Transit car for each new ART system builtAi??in Vancouver, New York, and Kuala Lumpor having different designed cars. Now the Evergreen line is getting a new and improved ARTAi??Mk. 3 car.
Though Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur ART cars look similar, the KL cars are taller and shorter than the Vancouver edition. Now, with the Evergreen line, a new Mk.3 ART car has appeared and this poses the question; “How is Bombardier Inc. going to recoup the development costs for the new ART Mk. 3 car?”.
The Mk. 3 SkyTrain/ART car was built for the Honolulu light-metro, a project that Bombardier Inc. felt sure it would win (their confidence was high because they spent a lot of money convincing people to build withAi??their automatic metro instead of light rail)Ai??but Ansaldo pipped Bombardier at the post for the contract leaving Bombardier with a new metro car, with noneAi??being ordered. Instead of cheaper Mk. 2 cars, TransLink was forced to buy the more expensive Mk. 3 model because it was the only car Bombardier offered for the Evergreen Line bid.
Designing new rail cars is not cheap and the developmental costs must be recouped through sales of the car, yet the market does not seem to support a Mk. 3 car, unless there is an agreement, by one of the transit authorities using SkyTrain for a large order, which leaves only Vancouver and Kuala Lumpor. The Yongin Line Line in Korea, uses the much cheaper Mk.2 car built for the JFK ART.
The new cars being built for the Evergreen Line are being advertisedAi??Mk.3Ai??metro cars -Ai??four car train-sets gangwayed throughout. This gives rise to an interesting thought; are the new metro cars being delivered for the Evergreen Line now, aAi??pre-production metro cars for the Broadway subway? Bombardier Inc. must recoup its investment with theAi??Mk.3 metro car and the City of Vancouver, the provincial MOT, and TransLink seems hell bent in helping Bombardier to achieve this goal.
Will the Broadway subway be a package deal be announced when the Mk.1 cars are retired within the next decade and replaced with a large order of Bombardier Mk.3 metro cars – is thisAi??TransLink’s end game?
You heard it here first!
The Vancouver SkyTrain Mk.2 ART car -married pair.
The Kennedy Airport ART car – married Pair
The Kuala Lumpor ART car -married pair
Where to start? The buses to UBC are packed in the morning and empty on the return trip to Commercial Drive while the trolley buses with their routes “fragmented” to only operate part way along Broadway and to make the trolley buses impotent putter about with few on board to deliver riders to the express 99 B-Line buses.
Even at the busiest time of the day, for the round trip, the 99 B-Lines are 50% empty. To UBC for 75% of the day, the bus capacity to UBC far exceeds the transit demand and a SkyTrain line to UBC would be silly. Any over crowding to UBC is by design. TransLink has contrived the over crowding on the 99 B-Lines to give TransLink a reason to extend SkyTrain to UBC – look at all the overcrowding for one hour out of the 24 hours, proclaims TransLink in the Vancouver Sun! TransLink is simply cramming too many riders down Broadway to make the over crowding happen. It is merely a spectacle.
TransLink for the two weeks over the Christmas holidays operated express buses costing over $36,000 daily to UBC until 2:30 am when UBC was closed. At the same time TransLink operated regular buses until 3:30 am to get riders to the express buses because the express buses only stop every kilometre – hardly anyone was on board any of the buses. On Christmas Day residents in Point Grey were furious, not as much about the cost, but by the noise and emissions from buses rumbling 15 metres from their homes.
TransLink is going to spend $2.5 billion to build and integrate the Evergreen Line into the Expo Line and Millennium Line. Simply building a tram line from Coquitlam to Vancouver would cost about $500 million, instead, but the people at TransLink don’t want to admit that SkyTrain isn’t practical and keep scamming taxpayers and users for more money to expand SkyTrain.
For transit, TransLink has an operating budget of over $1 billion and moved about 300,000 people in 2011 ($3,333 per person). Edmonton with about a $210 million transit budget moved 120,000 people in 2011 ($1,750 per person).
Per capita ridership is higher in Edmonton than in Vancouver and people in Edmonton wait 30 minutes or longer for a bus in frigid weather during off peak hours. In Vancouver, buses operate every six minutes down Broadway during off peak hours because TransLink must keep its union bus drivers employed and happy! See the problem? Over spending on SkyTrain as well as too much off peak transit are the problems with TransLink and more funding to keep the bums employed at TransLink won’t fix a thing.