Frances Bula header image 2
← →

TransLink on autopilot with no new funding, improvements in sight

May 12th, 2010 · 13 Comments

I wasn’t at the day cruise/TransLink AGM (see previous post) but others were. Here are the reports from two pretty dedicated TransLink watchers, Frank Luba at the Province and Vancouver city councillor Geoff Meggs.

Categories: Uncategorized

  • SV

    “Frank Luba” -really?

  • I ‘heart’ negative press

    I’m all for bashing TransLink – I mean, who isn’t – but ‘autopilot’ sure is better than the situation elsewhere in North America where all major cities seem to be cutting transit service left, right & centre (witness the implosion in San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Toronto…).
    Stable funding to maintain status quo service is nothing to scoff at these days…

  • Glissando Remmy

    The Thought of The Day

    ” Translink have named Sky train car # 308, hmmm, are you ready for this, The Spirit of Johnny Boy Furlong! Voila! There is no better proof than this, that a number of highly paid talking heads at Translink Headquarters are simply moving air, in and out, during their “so called” working hours.”

    And I know Meggs approves of all this. He has already hired his own talking heads at the City of Vancouver. That’s what Vision did best during their first 18 months.

    The only other sensible explanation would be that maybe Translink knows something we don’t. Johnny Boy may be circling the drain or something. Legacy? Naaah! Jack has his plaza. But you know he’s a gonner.

    And Johnny says he was touched by all this charade. Appropriately touched, I hope. That’s too funny.

    The Spirit of Johnny Boy? No thank you. I’ll take The spirit of Johnny Walker anytime, ten times out of ten. And I’ll rather walk. But that’s me.

    We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

  • voony

    I have written my take on it:
    http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/translink-2009-annual-report-reviewed/

    the main concern is the degradation of the farebox recovery making the current ridership growth strategy not sustainable financially

  • Bill Smolick

    What’s wrong with being on “autopilot” some years?

    Last year was a big year for Translink. Lets let it shake out and see what happens before embarking down other ambitious roads.

  • zweisystem

    For another take on the story, Rail for the Valley offer this.

    Vancouver and the region still refuse to believe that they are doing it wrong and continue to squander massive sums of money on transit plans and projects, hoping against hope that they will get it right the next time.

    Doesn’t work, never has and never will.

    http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/has-translink-already-struck-the-finacial-iceberg/

  • Dan Cooper

    Thank you everyone for the various reports and links. G. Meggs puts it particularly well, I think, in saying (if I interpret/summarize correctly) that the biggest need is for more funding not yet more reorganization, and that the primary obstacle to moving forward on this has been the Provincial government.

    Voony, you might be interested – since you have a concern about bus stop frequency – that on route 33 (which has been great to have, the last year or so now!) there are only three stops between Granville and Cambie – one at Hemlock just a block after the Granville stop, one at Oak (600-650 meters later?), and one at Willow/Heather (500-550 meters later?). Happily, I live quite near one of them, but some folks would have a moderate haul to a stop. It is quite striking in comparison with, for example, the 9 on Broadway, which sometimes seems to stop every 100 feet (e.g. once on each side of Main St., then again half a block later at Kingsgate mall, again half a block after that at Brunswick, and yet again a block later at St. George). Obviously, the buses serve different purposes, and the 9 putatively coordinates with the 99, though factually this is quite hit and miss; still, it does make the 9 very slow.

    One thing I am curious about: do any of the folks who were at the AGM have a sense of how many of the attendees seemed to be average system users, as opposed to the other “stakeholders,” which I take to mean business and government representatives, mentioned by Ms. Rudin in the earlier thread? There certainly seemed to be a good turnout, and as much as can be told from the Buzzer’s photos, not all appear to have been “suits.” Then again, I am unconvinced that this was really the best time for a meeting to bring in the average transit (or road, or bridge) user, rather than the time that was most convenient for the board members and other attendees who came not outside of but as part of their work. See for example the graph in voony’s blog, showing bus service by hour. Many more people are taking the bus – presumably to work, school and the like – in the morning for “day shift” than are doing so for “evening” and “night” shifts.

    And now, I’ll stop flogging that topic!

  • Urbanismo

    “The Spirit of Johnny Boy?” I like the “?” Glissando.

    That this wan under-achieving bureaucrat is immortalized in a disposable chunk of metal is the other side of “let them eat cake”.

    That is but to distract the hoi poli.

    Some where back in the blogs there were, what, sixty opinions on the naming of the Broadway line and given the “compound-interest’ state of world wide finance I expect “name” to be of the genre . . . errrrr . . . ummmmm . . . who the hell cares?

    The essential quotient of TX is the layout of the city it serves. Students having to be crated, bus-wise, Sky Train-wise, LRT-wise, Tram-wise, what-ever-wise from Burnaby to UBC is absurd. Any crating from X to Y is absurd.

    No wonder Translink resorts to beatifying “one-due-a- blood-transfusion” to get the “citizenry’s” attention. (BTW who was on the cruise and whom did they represent?)

    Within the boundaries of the city sprawl is grotesque. Within Metro sprawl goes beyond grotesque! Much sprawl has to do with councils’ sodomized by “developers”, “realtors” and “speculators.”

    On the same subject, of interest is, that the burgeoning Chinese economy is in the same economic free fall
    http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2138 as here: reliance totally, totally, on building condos and other chunks of concrete. (You wont get that from Gloria, Tony or Ian).

    If we could mature beyond turf war squabbling and begin the re-order of Metro into Village Centers many TX issues would begin to come into focus: the best TX is no TX!

    It will not happen over night. But given the state of fractional reserve banking, nothing in the city is going to happen over night.

    But that is the crux of TX, all the armchair experts not withstanding.

  • MB

    The absence of federal government iinvolvement in the cities that house its own constituents is beyond comprehension.

    We need a National Transit Plan, preferably sometime this decade.

  • Bill Smolick

    > G. Meggs puts it particularly well, I think, in saying (if I interpret/
    > summarize correctly) that the biggest need is for more funding not yet more
    > reorganization, and that the primary obstacle to moving forward on this has
    > been the Provincial government.

    I’d hardly call one level of government blaming another “[putting] it particularly well.” I’d call it typically Canadian.

  • Bill Smolick

    I’d also call it passing the buck.

  • Norman

    Amazing – apparently we all agree on the need for better, more effective transportation, but no-one is willing to pay for it. The mayor of Burnaby prides himself on shooting down every funding proposal, other politicians promise, then criticize, both for political gain, and every improvement is met with a chorus of “it should have been done differently”. Nothing is free, but making needed changes will never be cheaper.

  • MB

    Though it’s not feasible right at this very moment, when gasoline does exceed $2 / litre (likely by 2013-14) the demand for transit will be loud and clear from all quarters.

    The politicians at senior levels of government will then find the money.