Take the L Train
Kudos to David Beers, editor of thetyee.ca, for his first rate piece in this morning's Globe on transportation and transit issues in Metro Vancouver.
The guest column is entitled "Rethinking the need for Speed," and it spells out the arguments for LRT over SkyTrain.
Read it and then circle your calendars for Wednesday, January 21, 2009 when THE LANGARA DIALOGUES, the monthly debate series held at the downtown Library will feature this topic:
Resolved: Skytrain has run its course; LRT is the way to go.
Mike Harcourt and Patrick Condon will lead the discussion.
4 comments:
Mike Harcourt has turned into a TOOL for right wingers. What's he doing speaking on this issue?
If one has read Prof. Carmen Hass-Klau’s 4 international transit studies, including Bus or Light Rail, Making the Right Choice, one would know that speed, in itself, is not the prime reason for people to take transit. Rather it is the over all ambiance of the transit system, including ease of use, ease of ticketing, lack of transfer, etc. that attracted customers to transit.
In Karlsruhe Germany, when the first zweisystem or tram/train came into operation, eliminating one transfer at the train station (commuter train to tram) ridership increased 423% from 488,400 customers a week to 2,0064,400 a week! The overall cost of Karlsruhe first tram/train worked out to $3.5 million/km. in 1992.
Subways have been very poor at attracting transit customers and except for lines with massive traffic flows, European transit planners tend not to plan for subway.
Three items of note:
Is that a picture of a Guided Light Transit or GLT vehicle, a hybrid bus/rail transit system that has fallen out of favour with transit planners? The single guide rail is a good clue.
Mike Harcourt, despite being Mayor of Vancouver and Premier of the province, hasn't a clue about transit and was/is a big supporter of RAV, the only metro system in the world that has a lower maximum capacity than LRT!
To date, despite all the hype and hoopla about SkyTrain, no SkyTrain system to date has operated faster or carried more people than modern LRT, yet it costs up to ten times more to build than LRT!
MJ
When Mike Harcourt was Premier of BC, there originally were plans to run an LRT along Lougheed highway and Broadway.
Unfortunately Harcourt resigned and was replaced by that nitwit Clark who came up with the bright idea of Skytrain for the Millenium Line, and two billion dollars later we are stuck with the horrendous costs.
What a pity, for it would have been so simple to extend the LRT both to UBC and the Tri-Cities.
Funny how it takes a Globe article and a professor to say it, before people begin to pay attention. Complete with ridership and cost figures, Malcolm Johnston - along with a few others - has been telling the truth about LRT vs the SkyTrain boondoggle for over ten years now. Harcourt did talk LRT. But, although it was, indeed, Glen Clark who was responsible for changing direction, he did so only after Ken Dobell - an alumnus of the Campbell/City of Vancouver school of government - took him back East to have a little chat with the Bombardier folks...a chat that led to GVRD taxpayers being speared on the hook of capital financing at a usurous 18% interest for the Millennium Line. We've been paying through the nose ever since. And we haven't even begun to see what the costs will be as the Expo Line nears the end of its mechanical and, by coincidence, its debt-financing life, in about 10 years or so. The question that SHOULD be asked at Langara is this: Where are the agreements between Bombardier/SNC-Lavalin and the provincial government, and how do they read? Because nothing else makes any sense.
On April 20, 2001, Vaughn Palmer wrote this in the Vancouver Sun: "One of Gordon Campbell's lesser-known election promises is also one of the most explicit. 'Everyone in this room should know this,' [Campbell] said at a fundraising dinner. 'We will scrap business subsidies once and for all. That will save you hundreds of millions of dollars.'"
And then he got elected.
One of the seven "assistance packages" Palmer quoted as being on the Liberals' hit list, was the "$400 million deal with Bombardier, which guaranteed the company a maintenance and operations contract on SkyTrain, in exchange for agreement to build a 'centre for advanced transit systems in BC."
It's my guess that the really lucrative part of the deal - the exorbitant debt-servicing charges which Johnston predicted long ago would put TransLink into the red - have never been factored into the cost of a SkyTrain system - not then, and certainly not now that everything has been taken behind the closed doors of the TransLink Board.
Federal governments, of all stripes, have given Bombardier direct subsidies to the tune of multi-millions of tax dollars. When non-Quebecois Canadians got antsy about that, the federal Liberals found a different way to do business: British Columbians send millions in gasoline taxes to Ottawa. In turn, Ottawa sends a small portion of that back BC for transit infrastructure...and then attaches a string to the money, such that the only company that can fit the specifications is the SkyTrain ALRT. The fact that the technology costs 30% or more to build than LRT, or that no-one else in the world seems to want it, is really beside the point. The point is that Bombardier/SNC-Lavalin continue to build their gravy train.
And as we have learned, aided and abetted by our own Liberal government, Cambie Street small-business owners are merely the collateral damage.
Liz J.
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