More Bad News For TransLink
The Charleroi light-metro, built but never used.
While TransLink’s senior bureaucrats are desperately trying to salvage their embarrassingly high stipends, more bad news; people like working from home.
Research Co. says 73 per cent of those polled expect to keep working from home after COVID-19.
If, even 25% of the 73% quoted in the news story, decide to work at home, it will have major implications for public transit in metro Vancouver!
The current $4.6 billion being spent to extend the Millennium and Expo Lines 12.8 km will be a major financial fiasco for TransLink if there is a 25% reduction in ridership. The decline in ridership would mean there will be no funding available to pay for the operation of the new light-metro extensions.
The $3 billion Broadway subway, alone, will add $40 million to TransLink’s already expensive operational budget!
The aging SkyTrain light-metro will consume more and more money to keep it in operation, because of declining ridership, will come from cannibalizing the rest of the bus system, especially in the suburbs.
Forget any plans to extend the subway to UBC or extending the light-metro beyond Fleetwood in Surrey, because it is just not going to happen.
TransLink desperately needs a plan B, but they don’t and are acting as lost babes in the woods. They are not, or seem they cannot, adjust to the new post Covid-19 world.
Memo to Kevin Desmond: Time to come clean and earn that fat salary and tell the Mayor’s Council on Transit extending the Expo and Millennium Lines in today’s Covid-19 world is just not viable!
Declining ridership means that both lines will be a financial drag on TransLink as reduced fare and tax income will mean reduced or discontinued bus service on lightly used routes.
Reduced incomes means taxpayers will not be able to pay higher fares and will vote for politicians who are not afraid to tackle the TransLink behemoth.
TransLink must make public transit both affordable and user friendly, something they are loath to do today, but will be demanded in a post Covid-19 world.
The great fear of Zwei, especially with the Broadway subway, is that it will be built, but there will be no money to operate it and it just becomes a $3 billion hole in the ground, just like the Charleroi, in Belgium.
Could this be the fate of the Fleetwood extension?
Canadians think they’ll continue working from home when pandemic ends: poll
By Robyn Crawford CKNWPosted April 17, 2020
A new poll suggests Canadians think they’ll continue working from home once the pandemic ends.
Research Co. says 73 per cent of those polled expect to keep working from home after COVID-19.
On top of that, 63 per cent say business travel can be phased out and replaced by video chat.
Research Co. president Mario Canseco said the pandemic is changing the way Canadians view their jobs.
“I think there’s definitely some wake-up calls for industries,” he said.
“It also has some implications for real estate, we may not need the offices to be as big as they are right now if we have people working from their homes.”Four-in-five “provisional home workers,” feel their company trusts they are doing their work from home, and almost seven-in-ten believe their company is perfectly equipped for them to carry on with their duties from home.
However, people do miss the grind.
Sixty-seven per cent of those polled miss interacting with their co workers, and 44 per cent miss their commute.
Research Co. conducted an online study conducted from April 9 to April 11, 2020, among 1,000 adults in Canada. The data has been statistically weighted according to Canadian census figures for age, gender and region. The margin of error—which measures sample variability—is +/- 3.1 percentage points, nineteen times out of twenty.
Built but never used the Charleroi light metro stands abandoned!
I’m starting to hear denials originating from City of Vancouver and Translink that, ‘No, we are not going bankrupt’…
What if the next shoe were fall? New York City went bankrupt in February 1975 at the height of its tower building mania.
The primary problem with Skytrain-and-Towers is that it does nothing for the mom-and-pop economy. Small businesses supplying the home building sector have been decimated several times over by the mega-projects in the private and public sectors.
Towers are built mostly for the off-shore market, where the capital Tsunami has been washing ashore with ever greater force since 2008, originating in the trade imbalance while communist China and Hong Kong. Both SARS and Covid pandemics originated in China under increasingly suspicious circumstances.
Breaking out of the Covid-19 economic shutdown is going to require massive capital injections from government. Skytrain-and-Towers are NOT the answer.
A Regional Transit System linking Metro Vancouver with the Fraser Valley is the single most important, shovel-ready project in our communities.
It is where the ‘job’ story begins.
Regional Transit from the North Shore (tunnel under study at Translink) to Chilliwack (New Pattullo Bridge design currently lacks a transit second deck) would trigger Neighborhood Revitalization in the Lower Mainland and new Tramtowns on feral lands from Cloverdale to Chilliwack.
55 new Tramtowns will house 275,000 people in affordable houses, built from value-added wood products.
Neighborhood Revitalization, in the up-town version of the human scale urbanism, would keep pace with 20-year growth projections in Vancouver. A 1% per year increase in housing space is all that is required.
However, just this small amount of new construction and infill will trigger neighborhood revitalization, converting arterials like Broadway, functioning like ‘open traffic sewers’, into neighborhood meeting places support much higher levels of social mixing.
The three elements combined—Regional Transit, Neighbourhood Revitalization and New Tramtowns—will be transformational.
A new human scale urbanism built in the local vernacular would boost the Forestry sector. Switching to renewable energy will boost the Mining sector with new demand for metals. And building the next 20 years in sustainable, human scale, local vernacular will end anthropogenic pollution and help bring back that salmon to pre-colonial levels.
That will put food on every table, and money in every pocket.