TransLink, The City of Vancouver, and the SkyTrain Lobby Practice Lysenkoism
The SkyTrain Lobby Is Watching You!
Lysenkoism: describes the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.
IgnoringAi?? the fact that the proprietary SkyTrain mini-metro system has been rejected by transit planners around the world as being extremely expensive for what it does and just being poorly designed, many local planners and engineers still hail SkyTrain as a ‘wonder system‘ despite the fact that only seven such systems have been built in 33 years and only two are seriously used for urban transport.
Ignoring facts has been the mainstay of TransLink, countless provincial ministers of transportation, professional engineers, planners and academics, in transit debates and regional transit planning in general. Why have so many people have stained their reputations, supporting a proprietary mini-metro, when the rest of the world has moved on, relegating SkyTrain as a historic footnote?
There are two reasons for so many so-call professional and academic people remain willfully blind on regional transit issues.
- Many people have made small fortunes by supporting SkyTrain and the SkyTrain planning and building process. Making large sums of money by doing very little is a very hard habit to give up, especially when the taxpayer is footing the bill.
- Many people have just been bamboozled by the SkyTrain lobby and are embarrassed to acknowledge it. Like sheep, they continue to baa, baa, the SkyTrain line for fear that they would be shown ignorant of transit issues.
Greed, ignorance and fear are the main ingredients of our regional transit planning and until that changes, the powers that be will still plan for SkyTrain and as building and operating SkyTrain is bankrupting TransLink, taxes will continually rise, further feeding greed, ignorance and fear.
This is called Lysenkoism and it is being practiced daily in metro Vancouver.
Lysenkoism crippled Soviet agriculture production for generations and it looks like it is doing the same in Vancouver with regional transport, using SkyTrain.
I have always viewed SkyTrain more as a tourist attraction than a commuter service.
Zweisystem replies: I have always viewed SkyTrain as an operating museum piece, on par with the Wuppertal Schwebebahn.
Yes, too many crooked individuals are milking taxpayers to make a living from transit here. Take a look at the “dire need” to do something about the terrible overcrowding on the 99 B-Line route, for instance. In reality, it is all contrived and a terrible hoax on the public. Despite the hyperbole about 2,000 pass-ups or whatever daily on the 99 B-Line route – nobody is stranded on the 99 B-Line route unless you call waiting six minutes for the first available bus seat rather than two minutes for the first bus seat – stranded.
How can New York, Toronto and other cities in North America have bus routes which are no where near as busy as the 99 B-Line route? Easy, none of these cities operate buses until 3:30 am or every two minutes on a single route (99 B-Line) to saturate it with riders.
It would be exceedingly easy to de-choke the 99 B-Line route – simply offer bus service at the same frequency as the 99 B-Line on say West 4th Avenue. However, fixing the overcrowding on the 99 B-Line route isn’t the desire of TransLink and the COV engineers who have forgone their professionalism as engineers to become toadies for TransLink controlled by developers.
Many thousands of people want to come from foreign lands to live in Vancouver. Lack of housing in Vancouver is getting in the way of this happening. Slimy developers teaming up with politicians such as Councillor Geoff Meggs of the City of Vancouver want to build the sky train line on Broadway to increase housing density to provide the housing for anyone with the cash to buy the million dollar condos which many Canadians working in Vancouver can’t afford.
Sky train to reduce vehicle use is merely the front. In fact, as the population grows, statistically, four new drivers are going to be added for every new transit user. This isn’t going to change to any extent in the near future and certainly not with more sky train transit based on the zero change in vehicle use every time that a sky train line has gone into operation in the past.
More sky train means more people, more pollution, more vehicles, more crime and more misery. Ironically, people who mostly don’t use transit are being taxed to pay for it under the guise that it will reduce vehicle road congestion!
How another 1,000,000 people living along Broadway with 86% of them not taking transit is going to reduce vehicle use isn’t quite clear to me. Is it clear to you? It really seems to me that condo developers tearing up trees and grass at Jericho Beach to build high density condos along another sky train line to UBC is not Green.
If we just build trams to accommodate the current population on Broadway, the developers don’t make money. Building trams (without the need to tax us) to improve transit conditions and capacity for transit users – means no money for developers and is a no go for Geoff Meggs. When you realize this, you begin to see the “dire need” for sky train – at least as far as Geoff Meggs and his developer friends are concerned.