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Transportation
An inconvenient transit
Neither buses nor Skytrain metro provide the answer to affordable public transit, but light rail rings the bell all over the world
By Malcolm Johnston,
Light Rail Committee
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When it comes to public transit, there are many inconvenient truths that local politicians and planners choose to ignore. For all of our investment in the regional transit system, including now $5 billion spent on the SkyTrain metro system, ridership has stagnated at 12% to 13% of the population for over a decade-and-a-half. There has been no noticeable modal shift from car to public transit, as total ridership increases have only kept pace with the rate of population increase.
What has gone wrong?
An important inconvenient truth is that buses have proven not to attract much new ridership and few motorists from their cars. This has been ignored by many, especially those advocating more buses and bus routes.
Greatly ignored is the inconvenient truth that our metro system is just too expensive to build and operate for the ridership it carries. For less than one-half the cost to build and over 40% less to operate, Calgary’s LRT system carries far more passengers (222,000 per day) than SkyTrain. As a result of the large construction costs of the metro, local bureaucrats and politicians say, "there is not enough density for rapid transit in the Fraser Valley." Yet in Karlsruhe, Germany, the transit authority operates over 400 km of LRT in an area roughly the same size and density as the Fraser Valley.
Another inconvenient truth is that modern light rail or LRT is the most built rail transit mode in the world. Since the SkyTrain proprietary metro system was first marketed in the late 1970s, only five have been built, but during the same period, over 100 new LRT systems have been built, with over 475 light rail systems in operation.
No one’s buying it
In the 21st century, public transit is seen as a product, and if the product is not user-friendly, no one will buy. It seems very few, except the poor, the elderly, and students, are buying TransLink’s current product, yet they plan and build more of the same.
In the new world of “green” transportation, to greatly reduce CO2 discharge in the lower mainland, one must design a transit system to attract the motorist from the car. To do so, the region needs a minimum of 300 km of rail transit to create a viable network and to offer an attractive product. The province is already planning to spend $4.5 billion on the Gateway highways project, which is definitely not green‚ but the same amount of investment could create an affordable light rail network.
At $125 million per km, 300 km of the Canada Line would cost over $37.5 billion. At $90 million per km, the Evergreen hybrid LRT/ metro line, expanded out to 300 km, would cost $27 billion. Using the average cost of $25 million per km of recently built US LRT lines as an example, 300 km would cost $7.5 billion. That’s expensive but affordable.
300km for Gateway prices
But using Karlsruhe’s famous and award-winning zwei-system LRT as a template, at a cost of about $15 million per km, which includes track-sharing with regular railways, 300 km would cost about $4.5 billion, or about the same cost as the Gateway project. Here we have an example of how we can service the GVRD and Fraser Valley with affordable light rail transit.
Karlsruhe’s zwei-system LRT won the "Most user-friendly product" award from the prestigious German business magazine DM, and why not, ridership increased a whopping 475% on the system after only a few months of operation.
Building 300 km of rail network for our region is possible if we use the right example. Instead of our politicians talking green and parading around in very expensive hybrid cars to cut ribbons in front of very expensive metro systems and pretending they are green‚ they should walk the green walk and start supporting affordable and efficient regional urban rail service. Around the world, politicians and planners have seen the green light and are rapidly expanding their light rail systems to create the affordable product that will attract customers. But not so in Vancouver— where green transit is still at amber and rapidly turning red.
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