Quote:
Originally Posted by xd_1771
Honestly, I think they're just panicking. After a history of LRT plans being replaced by SkyTrain through an override that usually happened through a senior government switch of some sort, now we have the same override but now it is a result of the will of the municipal government and the people who elected them. I do believe this is a first in our region! And as such it is also a situation we are not familiar with handling. The one example that might come to mind in Canada would be Toronto (the Scarborough/Rob Ford debacle), and the other Mayors probably have fears of a Rob Ford style scenario happening but at the end of the day you just cannot frame the Surrey situation in the same way.
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Important to note that Toronto has always had some manner of street-car/light-rail system, and thus pushing LRT there is an easier sell on the "cheaper" argument. However Rob Ford was right, Expanding the Subway is, and always will be the better option. It's also important to note that they also don't have interlined Subway systems, they have effectively three separate Subways, and the problem with the Scarborough RT was that it was intentionally run poorly, into the ground, and thus people saw it just an annoying transfer to get anywhere to/from the Scarborough area. That was not rejection of "Skytrain" there, but rather just calling a spade a spade and recognizing that they should have built the subway all the way there in the first place instead of experimenting with LRT, but hey without that line there would have been no Vancouver Skytrain so it is what it is.
Sounds familiar to what Surrey would have been saddled with anyway. Surrey would have wound up with a LRT system that people largely hate because it was an extra transfer that takes them nowhere. If the Skytrain comes every 75 seconds at maximum, you still get stuck waiting in Surrey for 7 minutes on each end. At the slowest the Skytrain is like 6 minutes, where as the Surrey LRT would have been 15 minutes all day except the rush hour. That's only a minor improvement over the bus schedule, and still assumed perfect reliability, which LRT's are lucky to have any when they're at grade.
It's like nobody wants to learn from history. Use only one kind of rolling stock that can be swapped out as it ages. London, New York and Toronto have all had to learn this lesson. We're going to see the Scarborough RT problem here with the Canada Line as well, since even though new cars can be ordered, that will only go to increase capacity. When it comes time to refurbish the cars, that will come at a reduction in capacity of the line since the cars will have to be physically removed from the line and transported somewhere to be torn down and refurbished. Can't just transfer some of Expo Line's rolling stock to it to make up for it, nor borrow some Subway cars from someone else.
So if the Surrey Line can be an extension of the Expo line to Langley, there can be expansions options put in to eventually have lines that go directly to Newton/Guildford in Surrey and White Rock.
But it's also important to point out that Langley is important as a gateway to the Fraser Valley, as 67% of travel trips from Metro Vancouver go to Abbotsford.
https://www.bctransit.com/documents/1507213420730
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