Political Documents Masquerading As Technical Documents

In BC, Business Cases are a dime a dozen and are merely politcal documents masquerading as technical ones.

It is photo-op silly season and with premier Horgan desperately trying to find a legacy project, the Expo Line extension to Langley is his current baby.

NDP leadership hopefuls where also there vying for their 10 second sound bytes as were federal Liberal MP’s ever ready for a snap election. Of course municipal politicos were in abundance as the October civic elections draw closer.

Will the Expo Line extension ever be built?

There was no mention of the new Operations and Maintenance Centre, needed before the start of operations, which will cost a fair chunk of change, as well silence on the much needed upgrades to the aging Expo Line.

The problem, I see with this light metro is. “who is going to use it?”

Very few people in Langley are commuting to Vancouver, or to central Surrey for that matter.

So let us wait until the contracts are awarded and see what the real costs will be.

The politicians had their fun and as a roof top parkade in East Vancouver collapsed, a 2 minute TV news clip will be reduced to 1 minute! Them’s the breaks.

 

Expo Line

Next stage in Surrey Langley SkyTrain extension unveiled

The new Surrey Langley SkyTrain extension is set to be complete by 2028, after officials approved the project’s business case.

The B.C. government, along with the federal government, provided more details on the major transit link Thursday.

Transportation Minister Rob Fleming, Minister Responsible for TransLink George Heyman, and Minister of State for Infrastructure Bowinn Ma spoke, along with Cloverdale-Langley City MP John Aldag on behalf of Federal Infrastructure Minister Dominic LeBlanc.

“This is the fastest growing region in the province. There is no doubt about it that every city here has a piece of that Surrey Langley, Langley municipality. We’ve made record investments because of this growth in things like hospitals, higher education, schools, childcare. And now, as I said, for the first time in 30 years, a massive rapid transit expansion,” Fleming said.

140 STATION SURREY LANGLEY SKYTRAIN
A sketch of the proposed 140 Station in Surrey. (B.C. Government / TransLink Image)

Once complete, the extension will connect the booming area south of the Fraser from King George Station in Surrey to 203 Street in Langley.

The cost of the project is slated to be $3.95 billon, with additional funds secured to build up transit around the stations, bringing the total cost to $4.01 billion.

“For this line we’re confirming a scope addition that is very important for our province and for people’s health and transportation needs generally, and that is $60 million in active transportation improvements that will complement the SkyTrain line along the Fraser Highway, bringing the total investment to $4.01 billion,” Fleming said.

The province unveiled the business case months ahead of schedule, and despite pandemic delays, the project is still expected to be complete two years ahead of schedule.

The link to Langley was earlier expected to be complete in 2030, however, the Surrey portion of the project is behind schedule as that was set to be done by 2025.

While details where conversations regarding the next steps were still ongoing in recent years, shovels have already broken ground on the 16-kilometre extension.

SURREY LANGLEY SKYTRAIN
(B.C. Government / TransLink Image)

Using available funding, work has begun in the Fleetwood area, as many commuters have likely noticed.

Last July, the federal government gave $1.3 billion in funding and promises were renewed that the extension would be built all in one go.

TransLink was initially supposed to take the lead on the project, but the province has since taken it over.

190 STATION SURREY LANGLEY SKYTRAIN
The look of the 190 Station in the Surrey Langley SkyTrain project. (B.C. Government / TransLink Image)

The province says completion is scheduled for late 2028.

Comments

16 Responses to “Political Documents Masquerading As Technical Documents”
  1. Major Hoople says:

    We found this so true in Vancouver with the Canada Line. Every document was politcal and technical data was hard to come by.

    The more we see of your transit planning, the more we worry that it will all come to a bad end.

    One of our engineers just returned from your city and it sounded surreal. Tents on the streets, addicts collapse and pick pockets and other undesirable types seem to control the city. Would it not be better to build cheaper transit and deal with these many problems?

    This brings to mind the following.

    Bent Flyvberg’s Law of Mega-projects and why politicians are obsessed with infrastructure at any cost.

    …the “political sublime,” which here is understood as the rapture politicians get from building monuments to themselves and their causes. Mega-projects are manifest, garner attention, and lend an air of proactiveness to their promoters. Moreover, they are media magnets, which appeals to politicians who seem to enjoy few things better than the visibility they get from starting mega-projects. Except maybe cutting the ribbon of one in the company of royals or presidents, who are likely to be present lured by the unique monumental and historical import of many mega-projects. This is the type of public exposure that helps get politicians re-elected. They therefore actively seek it out.

  2. zweisystem says:

    I have used Flyvberg’s quote many times.

    Yes the city has turned into a dump and the more they densify, the bigger dump it becomes.

  3. Haveacow says:

    Let’s look at this this way.

    Past business first. The $1.47 Billion for the new Yard (OMC#4) and upgrades comes from the money that includes, the $723 Million for 41-5 sections or car Skytrain sets, although that isn’t accurate but it will help the lay people (205 cars total).

    Roughly $305 Million for OMC #4 and the rest (around $442 Million) going to other system upgrades, hardware and software, including the new ATC operating system.

    It was paid for in the last 10 year plan. So yes, they, Translink, does have the cash on hand, so to speak.

    Now the new issue that Translink and the Provincial Government has blundered into!

    So the SLS Expo Line extension will cost $4.01 Billion however, JUST LIKE I SAID THE PROVINCE WOULD DO, they have turned one single project into 2 separate projects but not separated them into multiple project phases. The new yard the OMC#5 is a seperate project that is budgeted as costing between $500 Million to $1 Billion, WOW!

    Since you can’t build and operate the line without its urgently needed yard (OMC#5), the provincial government MUST build that yard before the SLS extension begins operating. Legally its 2 separate projects but operationally both have to be done simultaneously, so the actual total cost for these linked projects is $4.5 -$5.0 Billion depending on the cost of that yard, not $4.01 Billion. AGAIN, TOLD YOU SO, WE KNEW IT WOULD COST THIS MUCH. JUST LIKE WE SAID IT WOULD!

    Both Zwei and I warned you Skytain fans! This line costs more than double the cost, of the original Phase 2, Surrey to Langley LRT Line which was around $1.9 – $2.0 Billion, and that price included the yard and the extra LRV’s. It’s almost triple what the idiot Mayor of Surrey said he could build it for. Most importantly, if this isn’t a fixed price contract like most LRT projects in Ontario (not all unfortunately) you are more than likely going to see another price increase when this project goes to tender. Regardless of the value attached to it by the cost benefit analysis, you could have had more than twice the mileage of this or around 32+ km of LRT service for a 16 km Skytrain project.

    The Big Blunder

    In an effort more than likely to avoid the bad press of another big project cost increase, the provincial government has broken up a single phase project into 2 separate projects. This was obviously done for political reasons not financial or for the ease of engineering because this approach will actually increases the cost for both. This why I warned you about this possibility beforehand, in a previous post on this blog.

    My first question, why is this yard (OMC #5), so expensive? Have they paid for the land yet?

    I don’t know what reason is worse for a yard that will cost between $500 million and $1 billion:

    (1). The province hasn’t paid for the land yet and are going to get absolutely screwed in the land’s purchase cost because they and everyone else who owns land near this project knows that, the provincial government HAS TO build the yard somewhere along this line extension before the line opens.

    (2) They already bought the land and did get screwed in the land’s purchase cost.

    (3). The province already bought the land at a good price and they are possibly building the most over priced rail storage and maintenance yard in Canadian rapid transit history.

    (4). Some combination of the previous choices.

    (5). They truly purchased a monstrously huge piece land, with ample room to allow for future fleet growth and plan to build a maintenance and operations facility with train handling capacity that matches the land purchase in scope. I’m really praying that is the reason!

    Zwei replies: Knowing the NDP past, they probably bought the land from a party member, just like what happened with the Ferry terminal at Duke Point.

  4. Haveacow says:

    Here is something else to think about. This line extension, according to Translink and the provincial government of BC, is going to move 56000 passengers a day upon opening in 2028. That’s roughly 53% of the daily passengers per line-km average for the rest of the Skytrain system (3500 passengers per km per day vs 6613 passengers per km per day).

    They both admits that this is the equivalent to what the 99 B express bus line moved per day in 2019. They are spending billions to move the same number of passengers you already move on Broadway with busses. They are currently spending $2.83 Billion to move passengers in a 5.7 km Skytrain tunnel under Broadway, the busiest corridor in the city. Yet it’s good to spend somewhere between $1.67 billion and $2.17 billion more, to move the same number of passengers per day between Surrey and Langley.

    Our South-East Bus Transitway moved more people than that per day in 2019 and it sure wouldn’t cost that much to build.

    Toronto spent only $2.3 million on King Street in downtown Toronto to improve passenger service on a streetcar corridor which moved more people per day in 2019 than the SLS line extension will move on opening day (84000 vs 56000) at a cost of billions.

  5. Avery Johnson says:

    “you could have had more than twice the mileage of this or around 32+ km of LRT service for a 16 km Skytrain project”

    The Green Line in Calgary costs ~240 million/km which is about the same price as the SLS. It’s very easy to talk about theoretical transit costs but if you look at real works costs for greenfield LRT lines in Calgary and Toronto they end up costing pretty much the same as Skytrain except they’re slower and have lower ridership.

    The day one ridership projections are a poor way to look at it. The reality is the the goal of the project is to shape regional growth and development south of the Fraser around transit. As these areas develop ridership will grow.

    Zwei replies: Actually, Calgary has traditionally carried more customers than SkyTrain at a 40% less cost. Calgary’s LRT actually has a much higher capacity than our pygmy light metro system.Speed is a non issue and unless there are the identical amount of stations, one could argue that actual door to door travel times are faster for Calgary than Vancouver because the C-Train has more station access, which accounts for a smaller commercial speed.

    The initial Green Line includes 4 km of subway/tunnel with a total cost of $231 mil/km. The SLS total cost is $312 mil/km without a tunnel/subway. subtract $2 billion for the subway ($500/km), the remaining 16 km of line cost $163 mil/km, considerably less than the SLS.

    https://transitcosts.com/calgary-green-line-stage-1/

  6. Major Hoople says:

    Determining ridership for a said transit route is somewhat complicated. What a transit route carries today may not be the same 10 or 20 years from now.

    From our point of view, the line to Langley and the subway are grossly over built for what they will do. Waiting for predicted ridership to increase is a fools game because the wear and tear of the stadtbahn is quite expensive. One must consider future costs when planning for today’s use. Many a German city have had their finances come to grief when the subway they wanted 25 years ago has come back to haunt them with today’s maintenance costs.

    In your case, your stadtban services town centers but not where people want to go, which has limited your ridership. Transit customers hate transfers and we have ample evidence that when a transfer is removed, ridership increases greatly. From the statistics we read, your transit system is very poor in attracting ridership, something that has been observed for the past 25 years.

    What we see is that old adage that your politicians by continuing their fascination with your SkyTrain continually try to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. Your taxpayers are paying the penalty. We will stick with our trams thank you, there is nothing to learn here.

  7. Bill Burgess says:

    Mr. Hoople, you don’t detail what statistics you read, but I presume you would accept that a good general indicator of transit use is the rate of commuting to work by transit.

    If you go to https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/article/00008-eng.htm (e.g., Table 8) you will see that, in the last census before Covid, Metro Vancouver had the third highest rate of commuting by transit of all metros in Canada (Toronto was first and Montreal second).

    More to the point here, Vancouver had the highest perentage increase in commuting by transit between 1996 and 2016. Vancouver’s rate increased from 15.8% to 21.4% while, for example, Calgary’s rate increased from 13.9% to 15.4% and Ottawa’s rate from 18.0% to 18.9%.

    It is obvious that city size is the major determinant of transit use. It probably counts for a lot more than rail transit mode, e.g., light metro vs. LRT. And bus transit makes up a big share of the overal transit rate.

    In any case, the above numbers do not support claims like your’s that Vancouver has a poor record of attracting riders to transit….relative to other cities in North America.

    Relative to what is required for ecological sustainability Vancouver’s record is, of course, deplorable.

    I think it is widely understood that urban form in North America has been more shaped by autos than urban form in Europe. The success in using transit as a lever to promote more compact urban form is pretty limited. However, I wonder if your apparant antipathy to the strategy of using transit to promote ‘town centres’ assumes European rather than North American conditons.

  8. Major Hoople says:

    Light-metro has always been inferior to stadtbahn and why very few cities on our side of the pond build with it.

    Why spend the same amount of money for light-metro and not a regular metro and get far more value for one’s money.

    When we were in Vancouver and trying to win a bid for what is now called the Canada Line were were first perplexed and later dumbfounded why a government would spend more money on a light metro, which had far less carrying power and almost no expandability opportunities. Your politicians thinks it is successful but we use it as an example for investing in LRT or a tram. Lack of carrying power and limited scope makes it a classic transit “White Elephant”, to quote Herr Zwei.

    It is a myth that North American cities are shaped by the auto. In Germany many cities, rebuilt after the war, catered to autos. Trams were abandoned to give more space for autos. Very big metros were built, which later, for many, a very big mistake.

    Actual ridership on transit dropped as many former tram customers opted for the family chariot. Even though the new metro carried a lot of customers, it was less than the customers carried by the former tram lines closed because the subway.

    In Vancouver there is no comparison as your trams went decades before and there is nothing to compare your SkyTrain to.

    I hear news from professional friends in Vancouver, semi retired like me, that there is problems with your hospitals and medical centers with lack of funding. When your government is spending billions of dollars on what is nothing more than a rural spur line and a needless subway, this comes as no surprise and the same happened on our side of the pond where health monies were diverted to keep the prestigious subways in operation.

    I have prediction, if the Ukraine conflict last until next winter and I think it will, watch for your gas prices to skyrocket as it will here and I can tell you the people will begin to wonder quite loudly why so much money is being spent on so little transit.

  9. Bill Burgess says:

    Mr Hoople: “It is a myth that North American cities are shaped by the auto.”

    I believe that almost all urban experts believe otherwise. For example, see https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/transportation-urban-form/evolution-urban-density/

    Mr Hoople: “In Germany many cities, rebuilt after the war, catered to autos. Trams were abandoned to give more space for autos.”

    OK, but some of the greater density from before remained, relative to most North American cities. See comparable densities at http://demographia.com/db-hyperdense.htm. New York is the exception.

  10. Bill Burgess says:

    Apologies, the source on density I cited is screwed up. This one reports that large European cities have almost twice the density of those in North America (3021.sq km vs.1634 ): http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf, p. 21.

  11. Bill Burgess says:

    Apologies, the source on density I cited is screwed up. This one reports that large European cities average almost twice the density of those in North America (3021/sq km vs.1634 ): http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf, p. 21.

  12. Major Hoople says:

    From what we have learned, most North American Cities were laid out in a grid system by military cartographers, long before the auto. The RAV Line we learned that the road and street system in your locale, was laid out by military engineers in the mid 19th century.

    Indeed, European cities have larger condensed populations, yet we get by very successfully with trams. Today, subways are only considered if there are massive traffic flows on a rail route.

    The many European cities destroyed in the last war were designed with the auto in mind and retaining trams was a temporary measure due to the war and shortages thereafter.

    Germany planned to phase outs its tramways, except for a few cities by the turn of the last century, in fact the last tramway closed was in the 1980’s, which was a big, big mistake from my point of view.

    What revived the tram was that the replacement subways proved to be far more costly and transport far fewer customers, than the previous tramways. It seems that subways encouraged auto use, with auto-centric politcal parties supported subway expansion.

    Thankfully the policy of tramway abandonment has been reversed and now expanding.

    This is why Vancouver interests us with its continued expansion of your light metro system and why politicians allow this to happen. From the statistics we have read which are not the same as the statistics released to the public, your transit system is failing and it seems not one politicians is brave enough to tell the truth.

    How long this can be allowed to go on is a great puzzle.

  13. Bill Burgess says:

    Yes, before autos there were grid layouts in some city cores, including in Vancouver. What is now the City of Vancouver later developed along streetcar lines radiating out from this core. Auto-reliant suburbanization came later, notably residential developments that ‘leapfrogged’ the current urban boundary. This urban form is more prevalent in North America than Europe, and is a major factor in the lower density of North American metros.

    In recent decades, urban planning in Vancouver is supposedly premised on using transit to direct development into ‘town centres’ that promote European-level densities for the metro area as a whole. It has been too little too late. The SLS Business Case does not project any qualitative change in the transit share of travel, it is more a case of moderating the increase in auto trips.

  14. Haveacow says:

    @Major Hoople has a point, the reason that the 3rd most popular major street name in Ontario after King and Queen is Baseline, as in the Baseline of a geographic survey makes his reasoning clear.

    That being said, it is also true that much of our transportation infrastructure and built form is suited for the automobile, by design. That was determined during the depression by both US and Canadian government economic bodies and think-tanks that, any future economic growth based in the premise that, after a house, a private car was the biggest expense a family unit would have. A home with a car and new roads to drive on, were the pillars that both the government and industry determined would get them out of the depression and making families again and the associated population grow that would come along with it, as well as the need to supply good paying jobs to pay for it. The depression had made both mass immigration and home grown population growth an endangered species in North America.

    These types of economic bodies were common in the 1930’s and are largely responsible for the design of the post war world. The President’s Conference Committee was one of many, industrial and commercial groups in this case, studying one of the many industry related problems that existed at the time. The “President’s”in this group refered to the CEO’s of the streetcar builders as well as the managers of both the many private and small number of public transit companies (The T.T.C. in Toronto and “Muni”, in San Francisco are early public examples). They are responsible for two major designs the “A” Shell electric Trolley Bus design, made famous by Brill and it’s many international licensees, Preston Ontario’s, Preston Coach in Canada for example. The other the legendary P.C.C. Streetcar, often refered to as the world’s first Light Rail Vehicle.

    By shear dumb luck, a major world war really took care of the employment and industry problems. The conversion of that now much larger wartime economy back to a civilian one and the simple fact that, every other major economy in Europe or Asia that existed before the war, would take a decade or more to recover, led the economies of USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand into a major economic growth spirt. All the while, they had nearly zero major economic competition (other than each other) for better part of two decades after the war.

    Societies based in low density housing developments, cars, and supportive infrastructure spending were the basis of the post war economy. The issues based in that growth like the fact that, the building density was so low the infrastructure didn’t create enough taxes to support its own growth, the low price of petroleum at the time led to very bad transport choices and transport related outcomes. Then add in the unfortunate realization that, the modern housing subdivision is based in both classicism as well as economic and cultural racism, didn’t help.

  15. zweisystem says:

    Zwei is going to reply to this one.

    Quote: “The SLS Business Case does not project any qualitative change in the transit share of travel, it is more a case of moderating the increase in auto trips.”

    This is absolute madness, the SLS is going to cost around $5 billion and it is not going to attract the motorist from the car? Madness, on the scale of utter stupidity. I have been told locally that TransLink Studies (ones that will not be released by F.O.I. due to “proprietary” information) have shown that the SkyTrain light metro system has taken very car off the road and ridership comes from transferring bus passengers onto the light metro.

    I also have been told by planners visiting Vancouver back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, that our light metro system is next to useless for reducing congestion, rather it increases it by not directly servicing destinations other than downtown Vancouver.

    Locally there is great hype and hoopla in the local media that the Canada Line is a success, yet it barely carries a peak hour traffic flows around 6,000 pphpd and that is with the agreement all south Fraser buses disgorge their passengers at Bridgeport Station and forcibly transfer them onto the Canada Line. A tram costing a fraction to build could carry the same traffic flows.

    As noted by Mr.Cow:

    Here is something else to think about. This line extension, according to Translink and the provincial government of BC, is going to move 56000 passengers a day upon opening in 2028. That’s roughly 53% of the daily passengers per line-km average for the rest of the Skytrain system (3500 passengers per km per day vs 6613 passengers per km per day).

    They both admits that this is the equivalent to what the 99 B express bus line moved per day in 2019. They are spending billions to move the same number of passengers you already move on Broadway with busses. They are currently spending $2.83 Billion to move passengers in a 5.7 km Skytrain tunnel under Broadway, the busiest corridor in the city. Yet it’s good to spend somewhere between $1.67 billion and $2.17 billion more, to move the same number of passengers per day between Surrey and Langley.

    Our South-East Bus Transitway moved more people than that per day in 2019 and it sure wouldn’t cost that much to build.

    Toronto spent only $2.3 million on King Street in downtown Toronto to improve passenger service on a streetcar corridor which moved more people per day in 2019 than the SLS line extension will move on opening day (84000 vs 56000) at a cost of billions.

    Madness, they name is SkyTrain!

  16. Haveacow says:

    My last comment will be this. The Skytrain really isn’t a regional distance based, rapid transit system. It is a inner suburb to downtown or a inner suburb to inner suburb rail rapid transit system.

    The line extension fron Surrey to Langley is and will be showing just how expensive the technology is to build and how expensive it will be to operate. Even 22 years after opening it will still be only moving around 5000 passengers per km per day or about 75% of the current passengers per km/per day average of the existing system. This means that this portion of the Expo line from Surrey to Langley will require more subsidy to operate than the already existing Skytrain system does simply due to geographic distance and attract fewer passengers at the same time.

    Nothing illustrates the geographic limitation of the technology more than current SLS extension does. Each new significant segment of Skytrain, anything more than 8 to 10 km that is built further and further out from existing Skytrain yards seems to require, an entirely new yard or a major expansion of an existing one, just so servicing and trainset redeployment can be done efficiently and in a timely manner. Train storage and actual maintenance capacity is a whole seperate issue. That means each extension becomes even more expensive due to the fact that, a new yard and servicing site must be constructed each time the system grows outward horizontally. Ottawa’s LRT system desperate to keep costs down, make the new yards, light maintenance centres instead of full ones, saving hundreds of millions of dollars without seriously impacting maintenance. Each new Skytrain Yard or OMC (operations and maintenance centres) is and must be because of the automation, a full service yard.

    Yes, as a rail network grows in length and number of trainsets, more storage and servicing capacity is needed. However this driverless railway system requires very large, heavily protected and computerized yards, instead of just a simple set of latter track (multiple sets of track sidings used for storage) connected to and parallel to the main line running track itself, no large storage buildings required, just a protected operations cabnet and maybe extra fencing.

    This is how GO Transit builds new Train Storage facilities. Actually maintenance is done at 2 very large maintenance centres on a specific schedule. Keep in mind, this is a system with over 500 km of main line track and over 850 engines and passenger coaches with very little automation. The new GO Transit Region Rail Network (formerly GO RER) won’t change this situation too dramatically until, a lot of the planned Bi-Level EMU’s are purchased because the EMU’s will require an entirely new separated or a severely altered existing maintenance centre.

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