The TransLink Planning Pantomime Continues
On the Delta Optimist’s web page.
The trouble with TransLink, they promise the moon and the stars, but in the end, deliver the same old user unfriendly, expensive transit planning, ever hoping for different results.
Case in point, TransLink’s new CEO, from Baltimore. Well good old Zwei sent an email to Baltimore and what I got back was would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.
You are about to get a new CEO of Translink in the person of Kevin Quinn. this is a good news/bad news situation. Good news is we are rid of him, bad news you are getting him.
Mr Quinn may be the nicest yes man you will ever meet. he is very personable and friendly but have yet to actually see him in 6yrs have an opinion of his own and if he has any use for light rail he has kept it well hidden.
Hopefully you will have better luck than Baltimore, ridership is off (before pandemic) 2% year over year since he took over.
Well, we can predict the outcome of Mr. Quinn’s appointment as CEO, he will be as useless as the last. With TransLink, things never change, except for mediocrity.
Letters: Just more poor transit planning
So the TransLink planning pantomime continuesEditor:
I see TransLink’s traveling dog and pony show has reached Delta, promising visions of rapid transit to cure our transportation needs. Well a few weeks back, they promised the same for the North Shore.
TransLink’s big problem is that their six-figure salaried bureaucracy (numbering almost 1,000) doesn’t really know what they are talking about, as well, slept through their math classes. Those billions of dollars for rapid transit add up, something well-heeled civil servants don’t like talking about, like the much needed $3 billion rehab for the Expo and Millennium Lines.
The base cost to extend SkyTrain (not including cars), is now over $200 million/km; triple it for subway construction!
TransLink can’t even define rapid transit and misinforms everyone what rapid transit is. Modern light rail is not rapid transit, but could be and rapid bus is nowhere close to be rapid transit and is merely a limited stop express bus.
Light rail is a modern tram, which operates not on streets like a streetcar, but on a reserved or dedicated rights-of-way, thus obtaining operational characteristics of rapid transit, but at far cheaper cost. LRT made SkyTrain rapid transit obsolete by the mid 1980’s, but no one told our politicians that as they squander billions of dollars on what are no more than prestige projects, for photo-ops at election time.
So the TransLink planning pantomime continues, selling snake oil to gullible politicians and the public, yet I have not heard one politician calling TransLink out on their expensive traveling road show and calling it for what it is, pixie dust and sparkle pony planning.
I remember some years ago at a transportation conference, meeting a chap from TransLink. After the lectures and presentations, over a cool beer, the planner lamented on how obstructive transit planning was in Vancouver and how many levels of bureaucracy had to be breached.
He said that premiers wanted show-off transit systems, something the public can get their teeth into, for photographic opportunities. Mayors wanted all transit either on viaduct or in a tunnel so it would not impede auto traffic and the public wanted everything but not on their street.
Money would only be allocated if transit met the needs of the politicians, and in the end, they keep doing the same thing over and over again and got the very same results, much to the chagrin of the those elected.
This would not be tolerated on our side of the pond where transit money is carefully allocated and with much evidence that it will do as the planners wanted it to do.
We are still puzzled by your continued use of LIM powered trains. Certainly the bean counters in your part of the world can still add? LIM are so expensive to operate today and as you have opined before, your SkyTrain uses the wrong sort of LIM.
The real battle I see is getting the transit customer to return. It is hard enough here to get customers back again and from what we have heard the problem post pandemic is far worse in North America.
Also, the word is, Alstom is just started to do housecleaning and it does not look good for Bombardier’s former product lines. Certainly the poorer sellers are going to get the chop and sooner, rather than later.