The Current Vacuum In Regional Transit Planning

Where’s the transit?

This question is being asked more and more and despite the hype an hoopla from Translink in their quest for more money, there is absolutely no concept of a regional transit strategy. Oh yes, we have SkyTrain for Vancouver; light rail for Surrey; and express buses (BRT is somewhat a fraudulent term) everywhere, but there is no regional vision for transit in the metro Vancouver area.

TransLink’s planning has been Balkanized to suit the politics of the region. Vancouver politicians wants subways, so Broadway must have a $4 billion SkyTrain subway. Surrey wants light rail, so Translink is over engineering light rail to make it comparable in costs with SkyTrain to please both Surrey politicians and the entrenched SkyTrain lobby. The ruling BC Liberals and their acolytes want “rubber on asphalt” solutions, which translates into Bus Rapid Transit or BRT, for their massive new highway and bridge building program.

The result; a massively expensive, disjointed transit plan that favours election dates, rather than building an efficient and affordable transit network for the Metro Vancouver area.

In Europe, transit planning is based on pleasing transit customers with good service and designing transit in such a way to attract the motorist from the car, without bankrupting the taxpayer.

Until the region has a truly ‘Metro” transit authority, Hodge-podge transit planning will continue unabated. To clearly illustrate how political interference has fouled up our regional transit planning, both the Canada Line and the SkyTrain lines are light metro’s, both are fully automated, but because SkyTrain is a unconventional proprietary railway, which trains are power by Linear Induction Motors and the Canada Line is a conventional heavy rail metro, powered by conventional rotary motors, both transit systems are incompatible in operation! This means no through running or no joint procurement of vehicles. The Canada Line has further embarrassed itself by costing far more than TransLink anticipated and the scope of the project was so reduced that the Canada Line as built, has less capacity than a simple streetcar line costing about one fifth the cost! It will cost the taxpayer billions more to increase capacity on the Canada Line, so much so, it would be cheaper to build anew LRT line from Vancouver to Steveston and beyond.

Ai??It costs about $500 each month to put someone onto transit and TransLink only recovers about one-third of this cost from transit users on average; whereas, TransLink only recovers about 6% of the cost of transit from students on the U-Pass program.Ai?? Taxpayers subsidize 70% of the cost of transit on average, and every person on transit is a drain on the economy.Ai?? In addition, the heavy transit buses ruin the roads to increase the cost to municipalities for road maintenance.Ai?? Ironically, the municipalities pay TransLink for transit service to have TransLink destroy their roads in return.Ai?? Transit does not reduce the requirement for roads and leads to increased costs for more roads due the net reduction in road space by transit.

(Courtesy Eric Chris, professional engineer)

Afraid to admit past planning mistakes, including that the U-Pass program is slowly financially strangling transit operations, Translink continues to blunder along with unaffordable and unworkable transit solutions for the region. This has left the Vancouver Metro Region in a ” transit planning” vacuum and as we all know nature abhors a vacuum, so the province is filling the gap with very expensive bridge and highways building program.

L.A. North has arrived.