News item in the Georgia Straight – Light rail, not more SkyTrain, is answer to TransLinkA?ai??i??ai???s cash crunch
Well the Georgia Straight is not afraid to print contrary opinions about our regional transit scene, unlike our mainstream media. It is worth to link to the original story and read the comments, all the usual suspects, spewing their nonsense in a vain attempt to "repeat a lie often enough, it becomes fact".
Some are so puerile and silly to actually use Zweisystem's name, When the SkyTrain lobby stoops to such tactics, you just reinforce the arguments for building LRT as the those supporting SkyTrain have no real argument.
It is interesting to note, that if we had built with LRT as originally intended and invested the same amount of money, we would have had a LRT network at least three times as big as it is now, including a TramTrain to Chilliwack, carrying two to three times more ridership that SkyTrain carries today – pity.
News item in the Georgia Straight – Light rail, not more SkyTrain, is answer to TransLink’s cash crunch
A Portland low-floor LRV ascending the 7% grade to the Steel Bridge across the Willamette River.
September 13, 2011
By Malcolm Johnston
As P.T. Barnum observed, “There is a sucker born every minute,” and with the regional mayors goose-stepping in unison with TransLink’s demand for more money, it seems we are governed by “suckers”.
TransLink’s gambit was to scare regional mayors with dire predictions of transit chaos if new sources of taxpayer’s monies stopped flowing to the “ivory towers” on Kingsway, and it seems TransLink’s predictions of transit Armageddon worked.
What has been not tackled is why TransLink is short on cash. The answer is simple, yet the powers that be just do not want to hear it: it is SkyTrain.
SkyTrain is a proprietary light metro and the taxpayer is paying three to four times more to build it instead of modern light rail. Put another way, for every one kilometre of SkyTrain built, we could have built three to four kilometres of light rail transit.
The following example clearly illustrates the problem.
Portland, for an investment of $3 billion, has 85 kilometres of LRT, operating on four lines, with 85 stations. Portland also has two streetcar lines.
In Vancouver, for an investment of over $8 billion, has 69 kilometres of SkyTrain and Canada Line light metro (the Canada Line is not compatible with SkyTrain in operation), with 47 stations.
For almost one-third the investment, Portland has a larger urban rail network, with more stations, servicing more destinations.
For the anti-LRT crowd, today modern LRT can carry more passengers than SkyTrain and faster, if it is designed to do this, yet it can be built very cheaply if need be.
TransLink has bamboozled regional mayors with their SkyTrain nonsense for so long that they believe it themselves, and the result is ever higher taxes to fund hugely expensive mini-metro projects that again demand even more taxpayer’s monies, which in turn, again increases taxes and so on and so on.
Want to curb TransLink’s tax-and-spend appetite, then stop building SkyTrain and plan for LRT instead!
Malcolm Johnston is the past chair of the Light Rail Committee, a member of Rail for the Valley, and a 26-year member of the Light Rail Transit Association.
