Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
I'm gonna back up Logan here and say Surrey doesn't NEED rail transit the way that Broadway does, simply because none of their buses have 55,000 people a day riding it. There's no reason Surrey can't have articulated buses come every 3 minutes either, which I suspect would be enough.
That being said, the political reality is that Surrey is gonna get rail transit. And if it does, I want it to be future proof–I want it to be SkyTrain.
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GlassCity, Believe it or not; based off the last census...Here's the communities being serviced by Skytrain based on their population.
Metro Vancouver - serviced by Expo & Millenium Lines
Vancouver 603,502 2011
Burnaby 223,218 2011
Coquitlam 126,840 2011
New Westminster 65,976 2011
Total Population 1,019,536
South of Fraser serviced by four Expo-Line Skytrain Stations
Surrey 468,251 2011
Delta 99,863 2011
Langley 104,177 2011
Langley City 25,081 2011
Abbotsford 170,191 2011
Total Population 867,563
Population Difference
151,973
So...we don't have the population density...or do we need to fix our transit system so as to get more people out of their cars?
Let's face it, we're a
Coquitlam population away from being neck and neck with Vancouver/Burnaby/New West. And we have
4 Skytrain Stations serving the ENTIRETY of that population? Is it any wonder why we don't see the numbers on transit? Because simply put - TRANSIT SUCKS south of the Fraser and that's what we've been trying to say for the past two decades. WE DO have the population, but
it's just a matter of coaxing the population out of their cars and the only way to do that is better transit than the crap ass transit system that we have in place south of the Fraser River.
Take it from personal experience. I quit riding transit because I did NOT want to have to be stuck on a bus for 2 hrs trying to get points east of King George Boulevard.
Translink needs to do a complete rethink of the transit situation South of Fraser, because right now, what they have is not working if they want to attract more ridership. You have to make transit work and right now they see Vancouver Metro get more goodies than we do, so naturally they're not going to give up their cars. They'll say, You want me to ride transit with this crappy service (1/2 an hour between buses - I can use my damned car and get someplace quicker than that). Everything that has been done south of the Fraser is a BAND-AID.