[mylesmalley]

Re: Acadian and Via

I'm flabbergasted by the complete inability of Acadien's management to understand who their customers are and how to best service them. How anyone could have not predicted a massive drop in ridership by moving their major terminals to completely inconvenient locations is beyond me. Fredericton is particularly ridiculous, since so many riders are students and the old station was just ten minutes from campus.

That, and cutting routes because ridership is dropping because routes have been cut because ridership is down... is a pretty classic Catch-22.

As for Via... that's a tougher nut to crack. Trains are expensive to buy and operate and new lines are even more pricey. The only city in New Brunswick that can be reconnected is SJ. But there would be hardly enough inter-city commuting to Moncton to justify it. The only traffic on those trains otherwise will be people going to Montreal and west.

I don't know if any of you have checked what Via's fares are like, but they aren't exactly competitive. Especially so when you consider that it's a 16 hour trip to Montreal from Moncton, and around 24 to Toronto. For less than the cost of a train, you can fly Porter to Toronto in the a.m., enjoy yourself all day, and fly back to Moncton via Porter in the time ti would take you to go most of the way to Montreal by train.

So if Via won't improve regional transport, i think their only course of action is to go after the people who would normally take the bus to head out of the Maritimes. For those people, the train is just as practical and fast, and a hell of a better trip than by bus. If you've ever been stuck beside a drunk or a crazy person on a bus for five hours (I sure have), then you know how great it is to get up and walk away to find a different seat.

It's sad that we're in this predicament at all. If Moncton, SJ, Charlottetown and Freddy were all roughly the size of Halifax today, it would be easy to justify inter-urban and regional rail transport and economies of scale would keep it affordable. Unfortunately, I just don't think we have the critical mass we need to make a good go of it.



Re: Tolls on the TCH through New Brunswick
Roads are a public good, but not everyone gets the same benefit from them. More importantly, some do a whole lot more damage than others. I don't think it's unfair to say that motorists should pay a toll to use the TCH. If the plaza is located past Riverglade, you'll avoid the issue of pissing off Salisbury commuters and only hit people taking the full trip to Fredericton. That said, you would save a lot of overhead if they put it just after Route 1 and Route 2 merge at Petitcodiac because you could effectively toll two highways for the price of one booth plaza.

My point about doing more damage is directed to trucks. While I fully appreciate the importance of the transportation industry, especially to Moncton (I drive by Midland, Sunburry and Armour's hubs every morning on my way to work), the trucking sector has based an entire industry off of a publicly funded network of roads. I think it's fair to come up with some kind of weight-based toll to mitigate the damage done by heavier trucks. Maybe that isn't feasible, but at least to me it seems like a fair compromise instead of a large flat rate on everybody.


Re: The quality of roads in this province
You'll get no argument from me. New Brunswick has an unbelievable length of public roads for its size and population. Frankly, we can't afford it. I've long advocated that we make an effort to decommission as many as we can. One need only glance at a map to see that there are places where there are two, three or more provincially maintained roads that run parallel to each other often very close together. If we pick the best roads to keep provincial, and make the rest local roads maintained by municipal governments, we can get away from a lot of the silliness we see all the time when it comes to road maintenance. If someone can tell me why the province should maintain control over Main Street, Elmwood Dr, and Mountain Road in Moncton and Acadie Avenue in Dieppe that are all within city limits, please enlighten me. Otherwise, let the cities handle them.

Granted the first issue is actually amending the way the province doles out transportation funding. I think we can all agree ti should be based on population and network size, rather than the current system. But that is an uphill battle in itself and I've already made this post way too long...