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Originally Posted by officedweller
One factor that seems to be underplayed is the role of U-Pass on ridership demand in the UBC corridor - the discounted U-Passes are bound to impact the analysis from a cost-effectiveness / financial viability / return on investment perspective.
While not all UBC-bound passengers are students on U-Pass, a significant proportion are - and shelling out billions on lower revenue generating service (despite high ridership) may not be the preferred alternative.
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You could argue it the other way, too. Students on U-Pass are already using transit; that's why UBC has such a high transit mode share. It's the employees and the faculty who aren't, because the bus —. I ride the bus because a) I practice what I preach, b) I don't know how to drive and the bus isn't bad enough to make me want to, and c) I have very little reason to own a car for other trips. But more senior faculty members usually drive. So the extra ridership you'd be getting out of railstitution is the kind that pays full fare rather than the one that has U-Pass.
Plus, there's the Downtown/Central Broadway-bound ridership out of Point Grey and western Kits, which are perpetually neglected in these analyses even though their density is higher than that of Surrey and comparable to those of places that are considered secondary transit centers like Richmond.
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It may well be that a return on investment analysis may favour phasing the line to Arbutus (serving the higher value workforce commuters of central Broadway over the discounted UBC student fares), then going to Surrey, then coming back to UBC.
i.e. Will a complete line to UBC pay for itself or create a financial deficit (because of the discounted student fares) - a deficit that could impede subsequent future expansion in Surrey (if Surrey is ranked after the UBC line)?
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You might ask the same question of Surrey. According to the current state of the alternatives analysis, all rail options on Broadway are basically even on operating costs: the cheapest, SkyTrain all the way, saves $7 million a year on operating costs, i.e. trivial. But the options in Surrey are the opposite, and the more expansive rail options raise costs by ~$25 million a year, which at a discount rate of 2% is equivalent to tacking more than $1 billion extra in construction costs.
The correct phasing is UBC > Surrey, and then thinking about secondary corridors like Arbutus or Hastings or a spur from the soon-to-be-named Evergreen Line to SFU.
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