My apologies in advance for what is a long post that I do not know you have an interest in. I recovered and parsed it from a failed preview form submission due to timeout, so I am resolute in posting it without further editing.
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Before the Mayor's Council made their announcement today, I figured transit investment would begin waning with the last major projects beginning by 2020 and then decline for a generation. After the announcement, and everything they did not say, I wouldn't be surprised if the Evergreen line is the last one built under Translink.
The mayors do not know how to negotiate and help each other, and there isn't enough money available anywhere to give everyone everything they want immediately to cover up the problem. Our mayors have increasingly been fighting each other with their announcements and through the media. While I don't see the opportunity for any further escalation, I do not see a Premier or Prime Minister being remotely attracted towards trying to help them when they won't help each other.
Now the one other chance to bring in money from other levels of government is if the Mayors' Council finds success in generating overwhelming support from voters across the region. That is why this was put to the public instead of working over time in private until there was a deal finalized. That is why the headline was not the precise new tax or fee they need to contribute what they have promised if the provincial and federal governments agree to the proposal. I think they have failed already because it is neither a seductive vision to believe in, nor is it a modest expenditure achieving prudent goals efficiently.
The Premier and Prime Minister have their own priorities, including establishing a budget surplus to forget embarrassing deficits. They both can easily deflect demands for transportation investment because they are spending elsewhere with the George Massey bridge or gas tax fund, and so this specific proposal is not their responsibility or at least not at this time
There are always more ways to spend money, and if it is transportation in the province then I think a much more seductive idea is a highway from Pemberton or Squamish to Powell River, and onward to a fixed crossing to Vancouver Island at Campbell River. That is something a politician can sell in many ways, on many levels, and it would be all their own to attach their name.
Translink has a short history, with one grand bargain put together by Gordon Campbell. There were new highways, new bridges, new bus driver and maintenance jobs, new skytrain infrastructure. He is a slimeball, but he knew how to build a package that brought parties into a consensus when he wanted.
This cannot even be called a package, it just appears to confirm division by announcing an unsupported resolution to convert 2 bus routes in Surrey to at-grade LRT and 4 lane Patullo being the happiest way of saying the only agreement is for nothing to happen. Otherwise it was the bare minimum with Seabus for North Van, tweaking NightBus to chase demand slowly enough to not upset cab companies, and half of a line that has been dangled as a promise since before Translink existed.
400 more buses to go from 1830 to 2230, when only in the last decade did Translink buy way too many buses, hire too many drivers, train too many mechanics, all overseen by too many managers to run new routes where they couldn't give away free rides. Which they only cut some of when they were forced to ration operating spending. So they propose building half a subway so they don't free up all that equipment and staff running the busiest bus route in North America. That's the vision to back up continuous tolling?
It's a lot of spending, coupled with additional new revenue authority that does not eliminate absurdities like taxes on private parking spaces, and it achieves very little for transportation. There will be the few who directly benefit from that spending, but that doesn't win a referendum against 3% additional property tax for no general benefit.
There was no imagination for something like a 3rd crossing to the North Shore, a trenched freeway through downtown Vancouver, extending the Canada Line to the Tsawassen ferry terminal, a year round connection to SFU, or anything visionary for a plan covering decades. On the Mayors Council there is isolation, with a preference to extremism, with a minimal coalition empowered by neutral members whose idea it is to ignore Translink's own studies, instead of trying to bring everyone on board.
If Translink isn't based in consistency and primarily becomes a means of telling others what they can't do, it will exclude its own partners who give it any power. If Translink does not even target clearing its backlog, I foresee only public anger at any attempt to increase their funding.
If Translink breaks up, I don't know if there would be 2 offspring or just multilateral agreements by individual cities. I do feel the future will be with funding and operation done as in the USA or Asia. An independent authority with fixed public funding, ability to issue bonds, fewer hidden taxes and fees, integrated/negotiated planning and zoning with the cities, ability to acquire and develop real estate with better programs covering commercial leasing, advertising and other corporate partnerships.
We're a lot like Toronto right now, their amalgamation just rearranges the form of the same stalemate. (LRT's support is deeply tied to its greater labour intensity with more spending on construction, maintenance, and conductors than bus routes. Skytrain's operating cost competitiveness is all from having no driver, and lower maintenance. The bus fleet expansion in Campbell's grand bargain was never about ridership and not just about concurrent union contract negotiations. We'd be better off giving away Teslas directly to Surrey residents instead of spending the money through their city council) If they could exit their amalgamation as easily as breaking up, or drastically cutting, Translink they might have already done it. With Compass coming online, we might see precise cuts to operating expenditures with per-km pricing and flattening subsidies regionally -- minimal protest and easy to handle in front of the media.
There is plenty of opportunity for the cities in the region to work together, at least if you're willing to help address each others' planning and risks over decades. By the time the Mayors Council could get back together, I expect real estate and gasoline prices to be adjusting with a historically probable recession and then the real prospect of automated vehicles entering the market driving the agenda with a new set of priorities (be it for deliveries, shared vehicles that are better than a bus or a cab, better road utilization, less strenuous commutes...) Transit investment comes, and goes, in waves across time everywhere it has ever been in the world. It's not because people grow smart or stupid, the context changes. It was dumb luck Vancouver led the recent wave thanks to Expo, not unlike Los Angeles with freeways and suburbs.
Where Expo set the framework for Skytrain oriented developments in the last 30 years, I expect the new cities that grow into former ALR land from Richmond/Delta/Tsawassen/Ladner/White Rock to be the defining marker of their time.
EDIT
I wrote this before reading anyone else's responses, including
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zassk
Well... that was fast:
B.C. rejects Metro Vancouver mayors' plan to use carbon tax to help fund $7.5-billion transit boost
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Pardon my understatement of assessed hostility and dysfunction. As a reminder, this gambit by the Mayors' Council is supposed to close the funding gap for Translink's current operating expenses that has been a public issue for a year or two now.
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