Yup, The Mainstream Media Gets It Wrong Again
Trust the mainstream media to get it wrong and with regional transit, they have been on the wrong track for a very long time.
What attracts people to transit?
It’s a complicated question that much time has been taken to study. Not so in TransLink’s world where it is claimed thatAi??SkyTrain’s speed alone will attract the motorist from the car. Following this dictum, TransLink forces as many bus passengers it canAi??onto SkyTrain or the Canada Line as possible (in fact TransLink admits that 80% of SkyTrain’s passengers first take a bus to the mini-metro) claiming both high ridership and mini-metro success; but is it really? Is recycling bus passengers onto a metro good transit practice?
The international Hass-Klau studies, starting with ‘Bus or light rail – making the right choice’ found that to making public transit successful enough to attract the motorist from the car had many factors and speed of the individualAi??bus, LRT, metro alone was only a minor part of a more complicated formula.
The international study found that overall commute time, doorstep to doorstep, had to be somewhat comparable to the car, not speed of the metro alone and something else far more important, the seamless (no-transfer) journey was extremely important in attracting the all important motorist from the car. Forcing bus customers onto SkyTrain, is contrary to what has been found to attract ridership and with TransLink forcing transfers (in the case of the Canada line, needless transfers) deters people, especially car drivers from taking transit. Notice the oft repeated Canada Line slogan that the new metro would take 200,000 car trips off the road per day has been quietly forgotten!
The mainstream media, who have never done much investigating of TransLink and its inept planning, blithely write that “we love our cars“, instead of doing real reporting, with headlinesAi??such as; “Despite $8 billion invested in our metro system alone, TransLink has failed to attract the motorist from the car”.
TransLink has got it wrong, but until it is reported that TransLink has got it wrong, the taxpayer will continue being fleeced of tax monies to fund hugely expensive mini-metro lines that do little or nothing in reducing gridlock and pollution.
Ai??
Editorial: We love our cars, so back off, TransLink
We still love our cars, even with the hassles.
Photograph by: File, Getty Images
Statistics Canada confirmed this week what everyone already knows, but the eco-activists in and out of government wish were not true: a massive majority of us still love our cars. (Well, some of us may not actually love them, but we sure as heck prefer them to riding transit.)
StatsCan found that more than 80 per cent of people still commute by private vehicle. The reason? It takes less than half as much time to get to and from work in a car than it does on transit. And the time spent driving, in a quiet, often air-conditioned space, listening to music rather than being crammed like cattle into steamy, swaying, often stinky boxes with at times unpleasant strangers is also a factor.
No matter how hard it tries, public transit can never be as good as private transportation, where individuals can develop solutions to their unique commuting needs. Socialism-inspired transit planners can never provide better solutions to individual needs no matter how many billions of dollars of our stolen money they throw at their mega-projects.
A generation ago, reasonably, public transit was designed to assist the poorer members of society while most people looked after their own transportation needs. More recent moves by politicians to tax people out of their vehicles to suit the agenda of eco-zealots is an attack on individual rights that must be resisted.
