The Selling of the Evergreen Line

From the Bill good Show on CKNW radio……..

9:00 -9:30
EVERGREEN LINE OPENS UP A WORLD OF BUSINESS POSSIBILITIES
Transportation minister Blair Lekstrom recently announced that construction for the Evergreen Line is expected to start at the end of next summer. And there is a lot of planning that will go on between now and then. The $1.2 billion project will connect Lougheed Town Centre with Coquitlam Central Station. Regional transportation commissioner Martin Crilly has said ridership depends on a municipality’s ability to encourage development along a line. How is the business community preparing for the Evergreen Line? How will they entice new businesses to set up shop along the route? And what about existing businesses? How are they going to make sure another Canada Line fiasco doesn't’t happen during the construction of the Evergreen Line?

RICHARD STEWART, COQUITLAM MAYOR

MICHAEL HIND, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TRI-CITIES CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

The Selling of the Evergreen Line is in full swing as politicians & their cronies, bureaucrats, city engineers, and planners are trying to justify the the Evergreen SkyTrain Line because it is good for their pocketbooks.  The Goebbels gambit is in play with the mainstream media singing hosannas about the mini-metro and like every mini-metro built before, the Millennium Line will be claimed a wondrous tool to make the region more livable, reduce congestion and pollution and so on. We have heard it all before.

The cost for the once $1.4 billion Evergreen Line is now advertised at $1.2 billion and on it goes, the selling of the Millennium Line. I would wonder that the same questionable accounting practices uncovered by BC's Auditor General with BC Hydro are being used by TransLink to mitigate the sticker shock of the new metro line. The mainstream media will never investigate that because rapid transit is a motherhood and apple pie story.

As stated before, we build hugely expensive metro lines in the Vancouver region as a mega project, to throw taxpayers money at political friends including land developers, not to efficiently and affordable move people. The Millennium Line, like the Canada line will be like a White Elephant, attracting very few new customers to transit and instead claim transit success by carrying recycled bus riders and $1.00 a day U-pass holding students.

What is conveniently forgotten is that the Evergreen Line is the uncompleted portion of the Millennium Line; uncompleted because the costs to build the SkyTrain extension to the TRI-Cities was grossly underestimated and there was no money to complete it. Sounds familiar, well it should because the costs of every metro line in Metro Vancouver has has been grossly underestimated (the Expo Line was built in three stages), but then if politicians and the taxpayer knew the real costs involved, they would not build with SkyTrain.

Bait and switch and political flim-flam is the hallmark of the two SkyTrain Lines and the elevated EMU Canada line – the Evergreen Line is just more of the same.