Quote:
Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut
Nice to see our new leadership working with each other. Things might be looking up.
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Yeah, that's rare! Vancouver and Surrey
not fighting each other on rapid transit. That is what we feared years ago and now it is actually
not happening. This is huge. I am hoping that most of the Mayors will recognize the synergy and vote with them.
There's some commotion as pointed out in Frances Bula's article, but I am thinking a lot of that will die down when most mayors realize that the capital cost commitment to an Expo: Langley SkyTrain ($2.9 billion) is actually less than the SNG LRT + Surrey-Langley LRT put together ($1.65 + $1.9 billion = $3.55 billion).
The 96 B-Line isn't suffering from major overcrowding issues, so a lot of service improvements (including additional transit priority, to address travel time/reliability) can be covered under the enhanced B-Line program and draw from the dedicated funding pool set up for that. More improvements can be delivered incrementally and with less community disruption compared to an all-at-once construction process. The funding envelope for both the 96B improvements and Expo: Langley SkyTrain would be less than the $3.55 billion total envelope for 27km of LRT.