TramTrain – TransLink Fears Success

A candid conversation with a former TransLink planner all most a year ago (I gather from an email he is happily motoring along in his motor home in New Mexico), may shed some light on TransLink’s current planning and fiscal ills. The problem seems to be TransLink’s planners and bureaucrats are afraid of success.

Why?

The fear is that LRT, if built (and especially the Valley TramTrain) would attract more new customers (people new to transit) than their current multi billion dollar transit projects. Despite the hype and hoopla from TransLink, ridership increases roughly matches population growth.

This is why Surrey’s planned for LRT is designed to be an expensive failure and why TransLink shuns TramTrain.

As the retired planner told me; “There is great fear by senior TransLink staff that a Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain would attract more non U-Pass new customers to transit than their new transit lines.”

The important phrase is non U-Pass holding customers because every new U-Pass customer is a post secondary students forced to purchase U-Pass plus nowAi?? massive black market in the Metro Vancouver region selling unused U-Passes, more and more people are riding on cheap, but probably not take transit if it were not for the deep discounted U-Pass. With over 130,000 U-Passes issued for 2015/16, permitting multiple boardings a day has greatly skewed TransLink ridership numbers and revenue.

So great was this fear in the past, that senior bureaucrats “sent to Coventry” then TransLink CEO Tom Prendergast because he was warming up to the idea of a Valley TramTrain service.

This, in part, caused him to leave TransLink.

This bodes ill for future transit planning in the region and gives credence for the call to dismantle TransLink and start anew.