The Costly White Elephant In The Room

While Vancouver mayor Pines for a SkyTrain subway under Broadway and Trudeau the Younger smiles at the cameras with promises of transit manna from heaven, no one is addressing the real subway issue: costs!

It is now estimated that the Millennium Line subway extension to Arbutus will now cost $3 billion or slightly higher, if construction started today.

It’s not.

There is no real timetable for construction and with more deserving transit investments needed elsewhere, the Broadway subway is more and more becoming an anachronism; dated by the Vancouver only philosophy that the only reason to build rapid transit is to greatly densify the transit corridor.

Political friends and insiders need to be paid off and academics need to save face until their retirements are only part of the problems with regional transit planning, but more and more, a Broadway SkyTrain subway is just becoming unaffordable.

The Scarborough subway, which is replacing Toronto’s only SkyTrain line, is a good example of what happens when politicians hijack transit planning to suit their own political agendas.

 

$1 billion funding gap for Scarborough transit a question of ai???prioritiesai??i??

Chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat says city council now needs to make the tough decisions on an “optimized” plan.

By Jennifer PagliaroCity Hall reporter
Tues., June 21, 2016

The cityai??i??s chief planner says the question over how to build transit in Scarborough is one of ai???prioritiesai??? ai??i?? a dilemma now facing council.

A report released Tuesday on a future transit network for the city recommends moving ahead with plans for both a one-stop subway extension and an LRT along Eglinton Ave., despite updated cost estimates showing the subway alone would eat up nearly all of the available funding.

ai???The question is one of competing priorities, and that really is a decision for city council to make,ai??? Jennifer Keesmaat told reporters Tuesday night.

ai???The work that you see before you today is based on a recognition that there are critical decisions, and important decisions, that need to be made around funding, in order to continue to advance the livability of the city.ai???

Keesmaat had earlier proposed an ai???optimizedai??? transit plan for Scarborough, one that reduced the number of proposed subway stops from three to one, ending the extension at the Scarborough Town Centre. She said the estimated savings could fund an LRT line along Eglinton Ave. with up to 17 new stops.

The LRT was seen as a political compromise on a subway plan which has been described by critics as a political football being used by Scarborough councillors and Mayor John Tory to win votes.

With only $3.56 billion currently committed to the Scarborough projects from three levels of government, critics question whether a single subway stop costing $2.9 billion can be justified.

For the rest of the story…….

Comments

One Response to “The Costly White Elephant In The Room”
  1. eric chris says:

    Nut cases who are plying for subway lines really need to agree to give up their salaries if things don’t go as planned. They claim that the subway is going to cut road congestion and air pollution. I don’t get it. In Vancouver, each kilometre of subway requires about seven dedicated diesel buses filling the lungs of everyone within 100 metres of the subway line with carcinogenic particles laced with arsenic, mercury and lead. These transit buses ticking off 90% of the population for the 10% of the population on them create more road congestion than they alleviate:

    “Let’s face it. When there are hundreds of buses stopping and starting every few hundred yards, there’s going to be an impact on traffic. When those buses aren’t there, space is freed up and the rest of the traffic doesn’t need to drive around them.”

    http://www.trucknews.com/features/transit-strike-improves-traffic/

    I almost choked on my coffee when I read the following declaration by Joyce Murray: TransLink is going to spend another $12 million on the planning and design of transport on Broadway. Okay, the hundreds of millions of dollars which TransLink has wasted on planning along Broadway so far was just for fun?

    “On June 16th, I was pleased to attend the launch of the Liberal Government’s very first finalized infrastructure Agreement, a deal with British Columbia worth $ 900 million in public transit improvements. This includes $12 million allocated for planning and design of better public transport along Broadway. As the project moves forward, proper consultation with Broadway merchants and local residents will be crucial to create the best possible outcome and I will work to make that happen.”

    http://joycemurray.parl.liberal.ca/infrastructure-agreement-with-british-columbia-under-new-public-transit-infrastructure-fund/

    Who bought up the land along the proposed subway stations on Broadway to make huge windfalls from the rezoning for 50 story condos being built with laundered drug money? Is it Gregor Robertson? How about Mikey Harcourt? How about Christy Clark? I’m just asking and am not insinuating anything.

    TransLink is after $3 billion to dig five kilometres of subway under Broadway in Vancouver – sounds crazy and pricey to me. This isn’t for public transit. It is to create the route for public transit – operating costs for the subway are extra as are the buses on Broadway to get riders to the subway stations. But wait, trams doing away with the bus transfer to the subway on Broadway reduce traffic congestion from public transit on Broadway and cut overall commuting times compared to the subway requiring transfers from buses. So, what are the morons at TransLink doing? Are they looking to go to court and to jail for fraudulent claims that the subway is to cut air pollution and road congestion?

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