The Mayor of Surrey delivers an unequivocal statement in support of gas-tax funding for TransLink’s Moving Forward strategy:
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts has come out strongly in favour of raising the gas tax to improve transit in Metro Vancouver.
Watts said residents should support a proposed two-cents-a-litre increase so the city can avoid smog and gridlock like that found in car-choked Los Angeles.
“Over the next two decades a million people will be moving into Metro Vancouver,” Watts said in a statement Tuesday. “This will add over 800,000 vehicles to our roads.
“Do we want gridlock and smog? Do we want our region to become [another] Los Angeles?” she asked
As Richard Campbell notes: “Great to see politicians all around the region pushing for funding for better transit. This was not the case 10 years ago.”
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The debate, however, has produced two real bad ideas:
(1) BC Conservative leader John Cummins suggests transferring 1 percent of all municipal and TransLink budgets to pay for debt-servicing costs for the Evergreen line. Why it’s assumed that right-wing politicians are better budget-managers than Lefties amazes me, given their record.
One thing for sure: using operating funds to pay for capital projects is very bad budgetting – and one would have thought that Cummins should know this. Mainly because capital projects require more in operating costs to run them – and that has to be anticipated before the project proceeds. And to reduce your operating budget to fund some other jurisdiction’s capital projects will get you in trouble in very short order.
(2) Metro Chair Lois Jackson thinks it would be a good idea to put the Mayor’s Council gas-tax proposal to a region-wide vote.
If the inititiative process in the states to the south of us isn’t sufficiently cautionary (it’s making them ungovernable), then simply consider how destructive such votes would be to anything like building a regional consensus in the future. If the Evergreen Line went down to defeat because of a negative vote in Delta, for instance, imagine how Coquitlam leaders would respond. I expect ‘revenge’ would be the first thing on their mind.
And after a few more votes and responses like that, we too would be ungovernable.
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UPDATE – Another cautionary tale from South of the Border: a Streetsblog Shortie on why bridge tolls should have been kept on New York’s East River bridges.
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3 bad ideas if you count selling off Skytrain station names to corporate bidders…
““Over the next two decades a million people will be moving into Metro Vancouver,” Watts said in a statement Tuesday. “This will add over 800,000 vehicles to our roads.”
It’s great to see her fighting for transit but this statement still bugs me. I don’t think we should assume that a million new people automatically equals 800,000 cars. That might be the case if we continue as we are now, but we already know that can’t happen. Even doing nothing that may not happen. We should be setting goals for car ownership that see figures like that lowered, not just held up as indesputable fact.
Sorry, but I think the referendum idea is exactly what is requried but not just about gas tax and funding, but about the scope or the actual desire of the populace to pay for a translink style transit system. I suspect, most people dont really want to build it at all and if that were found out now, we could be spending on things people do want.