A Province editorial, dated August 23, 2011 but actually from about 1956:
As much as many people would sympathize with the idea of Province letter writer Laura Lynn to hold an inquiry into TransLink spending, it’s unlikely much would be learned not revealed in the 2009 audit by thencomptroller-general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland.
She found that the much-despised transportation authority had a structural deficit because its constant expansion of services was outstripping its ability to pay. Certainly nothing has changed since, with TransLink promoting its Evergreen Line despite having enough cash without imposing new, totally unpopular tax hikes on a tapped-out and angry public, particularly drivers.
The overpaid social engineers at TransLink, on various municipal councils, and various taxpayer funded institutions such as Simon Fraser University have created the mess.
TransLink’s recent breathless announcement that ridership is again at an all-time high can be largely blamed on the organization and its backers’ constant attack on drivers. North America-high fuel taxes, criminal parking tax rates and a failure to upgrade the road system leading to congestion has forced people who otherwise would look after their own transportation needs on to public transit.
TransLink needs to stop expanding, take a breath, and work within its budget and not, as its officials constantly whine, demand higher taxes. As well, private transportation should be encouraged much more than is currently the fashion.
does she not wante funded schooling? i dont get it
Let’s hop in the Tardis and blow this place! Back to 2011 for us!
wow, if she thinks our fuel taxes and parking rates are high, she should go visit the rest of the planet (US excluded).
It’s always interesting to come across people who think they have a universal right to cheap gas and parking. I wonder where that belief comes from, sociologically speaking.
Playing devil’s advocate: I would be quite upset if I had to start paying for parking my bicycle.
You’re got to remember who The Province is writing for. They’ve lost the audience that often reads tabloids, transit riders, to the freebie tabs, 24 Hours and Metro. So they are catering to the audience that still reads newspapers. These tend to be older and elderly, suburban, home owners, and car drivers. The “1956 editorials” appeal to many of these people still – an audience that no doubt thinks Vancouver made a mistake by not building freeways through the city (and around Stanley park, as one plan had it). They are the sort of people who in Toronto elected Rob Ford – which happened only after the Mike Harris government forced the progressive central city of Toronto to merge with most of its suburbs.
Having recently driven through Seattle and Portland during rush hours, I am acutely aware that transportation problems are never improved by “encouraging private transportation” (unless, of course, that private transportation is human powered!) Objectively, it just doesn’t work. But the people The Province is writing for cannot accept this. They have in their heads the highways of the 1950s and 1960s when only a bare majority of families had cars — and only one car — and, following the American construction of its Interstate, a new, overbuilt Highway 1 (then called the 401) was opened–on the North Shore in 1959, from Vancouver to Chilliwack in 1964.
When these roads were opened there were way under half a million road motor vehicles in BC; today there are about 2.8 million. Many Province readers have a memory of a time when traffic moved swiftly on the 401 and they wonder why it can’t today. It could, if we built five to ten times more freeways than we have today. Building a few more won’t bring back the 50s and 60s, though. In Seattle, the I405 is really a second freeway parallel to the I5. Both are congested and morning and night, you crawl. Still, they have that dream, and The Province caters to it.
Excellent points regarding the Province’s readership, Neale. Like Gordon said, this editorial reads like it’s from a bygone era. People have a hard time letting go of the past – or rather, their faulty recollections of the past. Sure, highways had less traffic in the “good old days”, but I can’t help but think that the motordom love is part of a general longing for a 1950’s that existed exclusively on TV.
An American blogger recently had this to say about this mindset. She was writing about the topic of civil rights, but this could easily be written about the current nostalgia for a car-centric paradise that never existed:
“You don’t ever want the way things were. You want YOU as you were, in a time when you imagined you were better, more easily heroic, more virtuous, stronger. And what I want to take these people aside and tell them is, it’s pretty much as simple as getting up one morning and deciding not to suck so much as a human being, not resent so much all the imagined slights of somebody speaking Spanish in a store or the black president or whatever, not worry so much all the goddamn time that everything’s going to hell. Everything’s always been going to hell. The day after we crawled out of the mud somebody started a club about how the mud was better and we should never have left.
This is the world. You have to live in it. It gets a lot easier when you stop fighting it so hard in the name of returning to something you only think you saw one time.”
http://www.first-draft.com/2011/08/you-long-for-a-world-that-never-existed.html
Was this attributed somewhere that would lead people to use “she?” It reads like a Jon Ferry screed, but mercifully much shorter.
It’s particularly telling when they feel compelled to “blame” high transit ridership on something. It’s as if that’s not an achievement, but a failure, something that could only occur by forcing people through evil social engineering. The author clearly doesn’t believe anyone can actually prefer transit over a private vehicle. It seems like such an alien delusion for a city like Vancouver.
Let us look at this as a salvo in the upcoming municipal election – after all, without the Toronto Sun paving the way, would Rob Ford have got elected?
Fortunately for Vancouver, the outer suburbs don’t get a vote in the Vancouver election.
yes Tessa, when a newspaper find useful to run an editorial to “blame” Translink for high transit ridership. it is story telling enough…
A bit surprised people has underlined that blame more…
That someone in this region, in this day, could think that ANYTHING could force “people who otherwise would look after their own transportation needs on to public transit” made me choke a bit.. and then to blame it on congestion resulting from limited road expansion? Those poor commuters, having to sit next to strangers, maybe even TALK to someone, while enduring the agony of public transit. Won’t somebody please think of the children!
Neale’s perspective on The Province’s audience helped somewhat, but made me wonder if this aging group is going to become increasingly vocal as they struggle to deal with downsizing, having to give up their cars/”freedom”, etc. While optimistic young’uns like myself were hoping the battle was nearly over (based on ongoing expansion of transit networks, increased ridership, diminished stigmas, and so on), this editorial has made it obvious to me that in reality, the fight has hardly even begun.
Headline of tomorrow: “Province editorial staff lost at sea”
Sub-head: “All perish when their round-the-world cruise ship falls off the edge”
OK…it’s a tad mean…Jon and Gordzilla (In The City) are only giving voice to a constituency that should be heard and respected.
But we really do need to take a broader view of transportation. Combined, we use cars, buses, SkyTrains, SeaBuses, feet, bikes and skateboards for our trips and, as such, all of them are a part of our total network. We couldn’t do without any of them and they are all co-dependent in one way or another. So, that bus or SkyTrain car is as much a part of the network as a lane of roadway or a traffic light.
The motorists who complain about funding transit, which they never use, don’t realize that they’re funding every inch of roadway in the region, most of which they never use either. But without all those roads they never use, the ones they travel wouldn’t work.
The challenge we have is to get all elements of our transportation network in the right balance. Pushing new roads through built-up areas would be hideously expensive, much more so than a light rail line that could carry the equivalent of 6 lanes of traffic. To that point, here’s an interesting factoid: buses represent about 2 per cent of the traffic crossing the Lions Gate Bridge, but handle 28 per cent of the people making the crossing.
Ken, those are excellent points about funding and usage of an overall system.
When I spoke on CBC radio this morning about washrooms I had this same perspective in mind. Transit planning needs to be based on the notion of serving the whole customer, because we are transporting people, not goods. They don’t just pay a fare and then sit still for an hour or two.
Many Vancouver based transit advocates, … those who don’t actually use the system or do so only for short trips, … love to point to pictures of other transit systems around the world where people are packed like sardines into crowded carriages, perhaps with the assistance of paid “pushers” on the platform, and they say this is great, we could move herds of people at low cost.
But how great is it, really? People in this country or America, offered an alternative like that, are likely to want to pay a good deal more to use their car and enjoy a better class of accommodation. Transit planning needs to take into accounts costs and pricing/taxes, of course. But the consumer, who is also the fare-payer and taxpayer, has some minimum quality levels in mind as well, and that has to be part of the overall planning process.
I recently read an interesting analysis (http://bigthink.com/ideas/39500) of a study that found that climate change deniers overwhelmingly tend to be conservative white males. I think it may have some relevance to the ongoing debate about the evolution of our transportation system. Here’s a taste:
“So what is about CWMs that make them see the climate change issue this way? The “Cool Dudes” paper suggests that its partly because they’re WMs, and partly because they are Cs. The so-called “White Male Effect” in risk perception has found that white males between ages 18-59 are generally less afraid of things than white women or people of color of either gender. A famous “White Male Effect” paper suggested “Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it. Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.” That’s consistent with general theory about risk perception, which finds that for all of us, the more control we have the less afraid we are, and the more benefit we get from something, the less scary it is.
But what about the conservative part? Why would people who are politically conservative be more likely to deny the evidence about climate change? Well, conservatives are generally what Cultural Cognition theory calls Hierarchists. They like clear and fixed hierarchies of class and race and social structure, a rigid predictable ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ status quo. They don’t like government butting in trying to change things, and leveling the playing field, and taking from the haves who have earned it and giving to the have-nots who haven’t. Well, the solutions to climate change are going to take all kinds of government ‘butting in’, all sorts of adjustments to the economic status quo, interventions that will mean new winners and losers, changes to who’s where on the economic and power ladder, and to a hierarchist (i.e. conservative), that means somebody else’s sort of society – the society of “Egalitarians” who want things flexible and fair, not rigid and bound by class and hierarchy – is going to prevail.
That’s really threatening, way down deep in the psyche of the social human animal that depends on the tribe for welfare and even survival. If our tribe is on top, we feel safer. If our tribe is losing out, we feel threatened. If society is operating the way we want, we feel safer. If somebody else’s rules prevail, we feel threatened. So Cs – conservatives – who tend to be Hierarchical, feel threatened not by the facts of climate change but by what the solutions to climate change might do to the way society operates. They cherry pick the facts to support a view that will preserve the social order they prefer, and defend that view fiercely, because it’s about way more than climate change. It’s about protecting their identities, the tribe, their safety. Powerful stuff.”
The link I see to bikes is that they are challenging long-held assumptions to the status quo — about how we get around and the status that is ascribed to particular transport choices (e.g. the bus is seen as a “loser cruiser”, bikes are ridden by those can’t afford a car, luxury vehicles communicate wealth). Now, with bikes, walking and transit being touted as important tools for addressing a number of complex problems (e.g. peak oil, climate change, congestion, obesity, air pollution, urban livability) they are tipping the “happy motoring” apple cart of assumptions. So, folks find reasons to oppose them because it challenges their worldview. In response, governments investing in cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure are accused of waging a “war against cars” when they are simply responding to scientific evidence that signals the need for us to adapt our systems to a new set of circumstances. What I don’t know is if there’s a way around it absent a major event (e.g. price shock, large scale ecological disaster) that really drives home the point that change is upon us whether we like it or not.