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Mayors appear headed for .5 per cent sales tax to fund 10 years of transit improvements

December 11th, 2014 · 83 Comments

We’ll be hearing any hour now what the final wording and funding choice is for the regional mayors, as they head into the referendum. But all indications I’ve had the past two weeks is that it’s the sales tax only, as I wrote in my Globe story.

Fuel tax is seen as a losing proposition — revenues from fuel taxes are going down, as taxes plus other car costs are pushing drivers to drive less, buy more fuel-efficient cars, etc. A regional carbon tax would suffer from the same problems.

And a vehicle levy would be seen as penalizing drivers only, not the way to win a transit referendum. As TransLink surveys have shown in the past, people who predominantly drive tend to have more negative views of TransLink, are more likely to think money is being wasted, don’t have as positive views of transit as those who actually use it, etc.

So even though a sales tax has its problems, it’s spread around in a way likely to be perceived as more equal. (Yes, I know, transit riders will now be double-paying, through fares and the sales tax.)

And it seems as though Transportation Minister Todd Stone, after a strange wobble last week that threw everyone into a panic, is back on board (pun intended) with the general idea.

So the Retail Council of B.C. likely won’t be on side with this, and Langley businesses probably won’t be unhappy. But there are no great choices.

I know the mayors’ council and many others would like to move to a total road-pricing scheme at some point, i.e. billing people for their road use based on kilometres, size of vehicle, and time of day that they past through certain congestion points. A system like that could encourage people to travel during off-peak times to save money, which is as good as building new roads in terms of creating more capacity. And there’d likely be some kind of discount for people who have to drive, because there’s no decent transit in their areas.

But all of that will take time to figure out and the mayors figured they needed a money source they can tap into instantly, so the buses can be ordered, and the planning for the Broadway subway and Surrey light rail can start.

We’ve seen the announcement of the coalition supporting this emerge. Now waiting to see who will be lining up on the No or Nitpicking about Details side.

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  • Gerald Dobronov

    I disagree with you. The main transit projects in the plan aren’t just for moving people from one place to another, but also to direct and encourage growth and development. Those condo developments above and around Skytrain stations aren’t there just to reward the developers, but are part of a long-standing plan to house our growing population in places that makes sense – where transit is easy to access. The people living in those developments are not the ones clogging our roads with cars.

  • Gerald Dobronov

    I haven’t heard complaints about the Skytrain blocking views since the late 80’s!!

  • Brilliant

    Judging by how few people do any cycling along Cambie where it has bike lanes or the tiny amount that use the bike portion of the Canada Line bridge, there is no need to. Inconvenience the majority with bike lanes in Cambie Village.

  • Brilliant

    Most people using the Patullo have an option, they’re just to cheap to pay tolls.

  • Lewis_N_Villegas

    Lets meet for coffee at the Starbucks on Terminal Avenue. That location is 10 years old.

  • Chris Keam

    Why shouldn’t the people on the train be allowed to see the sky? The worst part of subways is the the underground aspect. The best part of the Skytrain is the fact that it makes million dollar views accessible to anyone.

  • Lewis_N_Villegas

    Kinda putting the cart before the horse here, Chris. The folks that live in the neighbourhood should get preference over those ‘just riding through’.

    Then again, people on surface transit (tram or BRT) DO see the sky! But they don’t block the view for everybody else.

  • Chris Keam

    Lewis:

    I strongly suspect that if this Council were promoting your preferred transit solution in the face of neighbourhood opposition, you’d be telling us how sometimes people have to think of the greater good. In other words, there is no philosophical difference between your position and mine, simply one of technology and location.

    Unless I’m misreading you and you do think temporary owners of a piece of property should have a greater say in the city-building process. That, to me, sounds like property=more rights to direct gov’t, which I don’t find appealing.

    As for surface transit affording views — only of cars, buildings, advertising. Once you get up a couple of stories, then it gets interesting. Further, my differentiation was between underground and elevated.

  • Gerald Dobronov

    I really don’t think it’s an issue. Granted it would be more difficult to build one in certain areas these days, but you’re the first person I’ve seen complain about it for decades. But then again, you can’t please everybody.

  • Lewis_N_Villegas

    It’s an issue with the folks that met today at the Mount Pleasant Library representing 5 Broadway corridor neighbourhood groups. All agreed right off the bat that an elevated skytrain on Broadway would be a disaster! Then, all agreed that the 4 km tunnel under broadway was much too expensive.

    Keep in mind that the “corridor” we are talking about stretches from UBC to Boundary (14 km). That the province is opting out of paying for a tunnel; but that the tunnel is only 4 km long. Thus, leaving 71% of this corridor—it looks and smells more like sprawl—in limbo as far as transit is concerned.

    I have not seen a train-in-the-sky that works. Not Chicago, Paris, San Jose, any of our lines in the Lower Mainland… Wait, there was one.

    Driving in NW France I saw a train in an elevated guideway crossing a valley green with agriculture and not a soul around. That and the freeway I was driving on were the only two interruptions in the landscape. Sure, out of the city limits in the farm fields, elevated trains are okay.

    I’m also a fan of the BNSF railway trestle that comes out of Crescent Beach across Mud Bay and ducks under Hwy. 99. Another example of a rail line outside the urban footprint. But follow that same line into Crescent Beach and White Rock and the problems increase hyperbolically.

    Trust me, I am FAR from the ONLY person that HATES trains in the sky!!!

  • logan5

    “I have not seen a train-in-the-sky that works. Not Chicago, Paris, San Jose, any of our lines in the Lower Mainland… Wait, there was one.”

    I presume by “works”, you’re referring to how horribly elevated tracks integrate themselves into urban areas. Berlin does a good job of integration with their s-bahn. I think Vancouver could do the same in some spots. Metrotown being the best candidate.

  • Internet made me obsolete

    Temporary owners of a piece of property have a greater stake in land-use decisions than tenants. Simple fact of life. They vote in larger numbers too as a result.
    Transient semi-employed hipster tenants focus on small, personal issues like their bikes or bus passes or a desire for rent control. Business and property owners are the foundation of a society. The rest come and go without much to show for it.

  • penguinstorm

    I’m tired of new taxes to fund transit. I love transit. Not really, but I use it. I’d rather be on a bike. Still, transit is great. I live on the North Shore FFS: without Transit it would be IMPOSSIBLE to get on the Lions Gate Bridge.

    Still, I’m tired of new taxes to fund transit. There’s a gas tax to fund Translink: a levy. Wait…no..there’s two, because the last time something along these lines happened the gang of thieves got together and said “we don’t want to INCREASE the current levy, so we’ll add another levy.” WTF? Seriously? How is that not the same thing?

    So now, another new tax for transit. They’re not leveraging the taxes they have, moving them up, allocating them better. A new tax.

    A vehicle levy might have made sense. This? No.

    Going cap in hand to the government and saying “give me some carbon tax money” would have made sense. This? No. (Make no mistake–it’s the same thing. These people who have voted to increase a tax to pay for services completely lack the authority to increase the tax. Why not just ask for money instead?)

    I suspect they haven’t even thought the implications of the freakish 1/2% increase through. There are software solutions that don’t allow for decimal places in tax fields.

    This is stupid.

  • penguinstorm

    Wuppertal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Suspension_Railway

  • Lewis_N_Villegas

    Been to Berlin (on the day of the 20th anniversary of the wall) in 1982. Didn’t ride the S-Bahn.

    I think there are some lines in Japan that tried very hard to integrate into the urban realm. Not been there, so hard to tell. I remember one LRT-Line lying on its side after the earthquake 10+ years ago.

    That was a bad moment for the engineers and seismic design.

    The other El that is horrible is the subway out of Manhattan and into Queens. It rides in the center boulevard, it looks like 1890s to 1920s vintage design… but it is AWFUL. And there is no reason for it anymore.

    Today we can put the same line on the ground and have it trip the traffic lights so that cross traffic moves when the trams are taking on (pre-paid) passengers; and the lights are always green when the tram needs to move. That gives us the same trip times as subways and skytrains once we factor in the time it takes to get to the platform or back from the platform on the separated grade systems.

    Although as we read here, some folks are not ready to accept that fact. So, there is a knowledge campaign to prosecute around this—starting with our elected officials, one may add.

    The Broadway Corridor as a “High Tech” job center—in the KPMG Feb 13, 2013 report “The UBC-Broadway Corridor – Unlocking the Economic Potential”—stretches from Blanca to Boundary. I’m not sure who KPMG think they’re fooling—that’s not a ‘tech district’ footprint. That’s just more urban sprawl. It is also something like 10 miles long, but we are only going to build a 4 km (2.5 mile) subway.

    So what about the other 7.5 miles?

    The best tram by far is the “Street Car Named Desire” skirting the edges of New Orleans French Quarter. Well, it’s name is really Desiré but Hollywood doesn’t do ‘French’ very well. That one was built at the time they designed the Garden District to appeal to a high-end clientele. Both sides of the tram boulevard are lined by gorgeous houses.

    The tram rides between lines of oak trees with spanish moss hanging from them, and here’s my favourite part: The locals use it for jogging. So, you can see a runner moving between the rails. Then, the street car comes and the runner moves to one side. Then, after the streetcar goes, the runner is back in the middle of the track.

    That’s one for the design notebook of the traffic engineers!

    This UBC-Broadway corridor is being foisted on the basis of creating a hi-tech economy in Vancouver out of the research at UBC and the concentration of medical services near Oak & Broadway.

    The distances are unmanageable (better to move it all within walking distance of itself). Besides, in San Jose, California, where the tech sector is very strong, they ride a surface tram to the airport and to the central high tech zone.

    However, lets not kid ourselves.San Jose is all car-oriented. The blocks are Richmond size; the streets are all 6-lanes-plus; there isn’t a walking destination anywhere; and you drive from work to home; and from home to the shopping mall. Period. Full stop.

    San Diego, the California city that the KPMG report cites, has the longest running tram service on the west coast. Its downtown is walkable. There is a great open air shopping mall there. And a zoo and a great park that are vestiges of the 1915 Pan-American Expo. But, I just don’t hear about San Diego as a great high-tech Mecca.

  • Chris Keam

    One of the basic rules of a democracy is that everybody gets a say regardless of whether or not they are a member of the propertied class. Why am I not surprised that you’re living in the 18th c?

  • rowbat

    You’re upset about multiple transit taxes, but surely a single transit tax (i.e. a tax on one thing only) doesn’t work well either. What would that one thing be?

    Given that the provincial government is virtually demanding that more transit funding be provided by dedicated and visible taxes, a range of sources seems the best and fairest option – some through gas taxes, some through property taxes, and some through sales taxes. Theoretically at least such a split can spread the tax load in a more equitable fashion.

    A vehicle levy might sound good to some, but it clearly hasn’t been acceptable to the majority of voters. It is also arguably punitive to those who really do need to drive, can’t use transit, but are already paying for transit through gas and property taxes.

    A regional .5% sales tax increase (in the less-universal PST only) seems like a sensible revenue source to me. As a homeowner who does use transit but doesn’t own a car – so I do pay property taxes, but wouldn’t pay a vehicle levy and am not paying gas taxes – I see the logic and fairness in it.

  • Mark Allerton

    The Mayor’s initial funding proposal asked for a slice of the Carbon Tax and Todd Stone told them to FRO. They were not allowed to put that on the ballot.

    If you’re looking for a gang of thieves here, you need to look slightly further afield than the Lower Mainland.

  • TessaGarnet

    Are you kidding me? You believe business owners who live here should get two votes? Or that Wal-Mart’s owners should get to choose our mayor? Any system where money literally buys votes wouldn’t be democracy at all.

  • TessaGarnet

    that’s right, you have to subsidize translink by…2.5 cents a beer.

  • Lysenko’s Nemesis

    The effrontery. Permitting the citizens to decide!

  • Lysenko’s Nemesis

    Why?

  • penguinstorm

    Call it democracy.

  • jolson

    It’s not the transit improvements or the .05% sales tax that will sink this plan, it’s the double talk about road pricing designed to generate $250 million a year. Causing financial pain for drivers in order to modify behavior (take the bus) is not going to get votes from drivers. We should understand that driving a car is not a financial issue, if it was we would all be on the bus by now because cars are thousands of times more expensive than the bus.

    Calling road pricing congestion pricing does not help sell the idea either. If we all pay the price we will all be as congested as we ever were.

    So what is road pricing really? Isn’t it just another scheme to save us from ourselves kind of like photo radar only this time it’s transponders; a new technology that will save us from traffic jams?

    The most offensive part about road pricing is the social engineering that it represents. Do we really want a society in which the poorest among us are discriminated against and the rich drive freely where ever they like? This does not seem to be very Canadian.

    We don’t need the transponder salesman to mess up. We have a good system for streaming revenue already and we have a good strategy for the development of multi modal transport which is being implemented. I and many others would be willing to pay twice the proposal to get these projects done. Just lose the road pricing add on!

  • Kirk

    Whenever I hear “user-fee”, I cringe. Obviously, it makes sense many times. But, often it’s very unfair, especially when allocating public resources.

    To this day, having paid seating on the beach for the fireworks still riles me up. It’s a public beach. It should be first come, first served! If you want a good spot, then camp out all day like the other die-hards. But, oneday, a rich guy and his spoiled kids said, “I’m not going to sit here out here allday with these commoners”. His butler reminded him it’s a public beach. “Call the mayor. Do you know who I am? I want a spot on the beach. Make it happen.” And, now, we have paid seating on the public beach where rich people can jump the queue and not have to rub shoulders with the great unwashed.

    Argh. Now, I’m all frustrated again.

  • IanS

    I just read in the Sun that the vote is not a referendum under the Referendum Act, but rather a plebiscite, so I should amend this response.

    I assume the plebiscite is authorized by section 282 of the Election Act, which provides as follows: “The Lieutenant Governor in Council may direct the chief electoral officer to
    conduct a plebiscite to determine the opinion of the voters in all or part of British
    Columbia on a matter of public concern specified by the Lieutenant Governor in
    Council.”

    I did not locate any relevant Regulations, but the definition of “voter” in the Election Act is as follows: “an individual who meets the qualifications referred to in
    section 31 to be registered as a voter under this Act”.

    The relevant portions of section 31 of the Election Act are as follows:

    “31 (1) An individual must meet all the following qualifications in order to register as a voter:

    (a) the individual must be a Canadian citizen;
    (b) the individual must be an individual

    (i) who is 18 years of age or older at the time of registration, or

    (ii) if an election is in progress for the electoral district for which the individual will be entitled to vote on registration, who will be 18 years of age or older on general voting day for the election;

    (c) the individual must have been a resident of British Columbia for the immediately preceding 6 months;”

    In the result, while the legislative authority for the vote is different than I’d assume, the citizenship requirement is the same.

  • MB

    It displays a complete abrogation of political leadership on the issue. If various levels of government think that raising funds for more transit is a good idea, they should campaign on that basis and then implement that policy if elected, rather than essentially washing their hands of it by putting it to a referendum. … It also makes no sense to put transit expansion to such a referendum, but not other major transportation projects …. A .5% increase in PST seems a small price to pay for the proposed transit benefits.

    Absolutely agree.

    And the silence from Ottawa is still deafening.

  • MB

    Lewis, that’s the provincial HST, not the federal GST. And the reinstatement of the PST did not “drive the sales tax down to realisitc levels.” It barely twitched.

    Cutting 2% from the GST in 2006 has now cost the federal government almost $100 billion ($14 billion a year) and added billions to the federal debt and interest payments. That money, if devoted to today’s urban transportation issues, would have resolved the majority of public transit woes in our 10 largest cities for the next three generations.

    Without federal involvement we lose a massive opportunity for exceedingly deep discounts on volume procurement orders on projects tendered at the national scale. No other entity can negotiate with vendors as powerfully as Public Works Canada, let alone obtain deep discounts on financing charges.

    All this anti-tax jabbering completely ignores the intrinsic value for money tax revenue can generate when managed well. The slanted ideological punditry habitually absents itself from life-cycle cost-benefit analyses. If they didn’t, then they would support transit over roads in every jurisdiction based solely on life-cycle, full accounting costs to the public purse.

  • MB

    Chris, I think I would upgrade that to the 19th C.

  • MB

    @ Lewis:

    I am looking forward to the day when we can elect Regional Councillors to handle sustainability issues that cross municipal boundaries but not provincial ones. Like waste treatment, renewable energy, transit, and regional growth strategies.

    Amen to that.

    However …..

    As for capacity of skytrain (or subway) over tram or BRT (not B-line, mind you, but BRT-trolleys on dedicated lanes, with signal priority and pre-paid boarding)…. Let’s do a comparison …. The “extra capacity” has just evaporated. A tram or BRT can match the level of service of grade separated transit.

    That is incorrect because your analysis excluded FREQUENCY. To achieve 320,000 people per day (TransLink’s RRT estimate … I suspect it will be a lot higher after a decade of use) at today’s 75-second SkyTrain frequencies at rush hours (four 6-car trains in both directions every five minutes, or 8 trains per station), which means 96 trains will arrive and depart at each station every hour during the morning and afternoon crush periods.

    At the eventual 60-decond frequencies you will see 120 trains an hour at each station during rush hour. There is no way the geomatics of Broadway would allow such frequencies on the surface without fencing off the middle two lanes (four lanes at stations) for 8 km with a break only every km at major cross arterials.

    This is counter to your pro-pedestrian stance. In fact, pedestrians will be railroaded by the Tram Lobby (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) in every instance where one must cross the street to the other side, except at stations / arterials. Please note that every intersection between Main and Alma currently has a signal, except for a handful. How will the West Broadway small businesses react to that?

    The only other solution I’ve heard is to slow the trains down … but then contradictorally promote signal priority. You won’t have both, I’m afraid, without catching hundreds of thousands of pedestrians off guard every year while the crosswalk signal cycle is suddenly shortened (translation: deaths and injuries). Slowing the trains down, well that pretty well mimics the Number Nine and 99 buses (without signal priority), so just what do you gain for your $1.5 billion expenditure? Certainly not a significant gain in ridership or frequency.

    So here we are again, hashing and rehashing all this stuff over and over again ad nauseum.

  • jenables

    Which is why we need electoral financing reform, Tessa. Because paying an army of people to call and knock on doors isn’t very fair either. Neither is magically knowing who has voted and who hasn’t.

  • TessaGarnet

    Oh I agree 100 per cent. And also reform for donations. Unfortunately our provincial leaders didn’t think that was as important as extending the mandate from three to four years.

  • jenables

    Which is also unfortunate when you consider the rationale for the former. Oh well. Merry Christmas Tessa and everyone else! Perhaps we’ll meet up in the new year for a mid winter drink. Cheers!

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