A Message for our MLAs: You’ll have to take a stand

This editorial from the North Shore News is worth printing in full:

The Lower Mainland’s mayors have done the insurmountable — agreed on something. With the mayors’ council on regional transportation report this week, we got a look at what transportation infrastructure could (and should) be in the decades ahead.

With the exception of Burnaby’s Mayor Derek Corrigan, whose community is already well-served by transit, the mayors have a list of priority projects and a plan to pay for them.

The problem is, the B.C. Liberals promised in their campaign that these badly needed improvements to our infrastructure will only get done if Lower Mainland voters feel like paying for them and approve that in a referendum.

It’s rare to find anyone who will volunteer to pay more tax when given the option.

We’ve spent the last 100 years building more roads with more lanes to service our sprawl and it is bankrupting us, lowering our quality of life and polluting our atmosphere beyond repair. And still we sit in traffic jams. It spits in the face of efficiency.

While we pay dearly for highways and bridges in our taxes we still absurdly regard roads as “free” and transit a nice-to-have in need of subsidy.

With the proper investment it deserves, transit will no longer be for those who can’t afford a car. It will be a desirable alternative.

As the mayor of Bogota, once one of the most congested cities in the word, said: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

When the editorial writers from the affluent suburbs start quoting Enrique Penaloza, you know something is up.

Another sign that the Mayors’ Council investment strategy has passed its first test: It’s not dead on arrival, dismissed by the commentators as being unwinnable, undesirable and unfair.

Indeed, if I were a Liberal MLA – say, Ralph Sultan (West Vancouver-Capilano), Jordan Sturdy (West Vancouver-Sea-to-Sky), Jane Thornthwaite (North Vancouver-Seymour) or Naomi Yamamoto (North Vancouver-Lonsdale) – I’d be wondering what mayor I’m going to be quoting, and how I’ll be wordsmithing my position on the referendum.

We’ll get a very good sense of whether the provincial government wants this referendum to win (and hence supports the vision of a transit-oriented region) by the degree of participation and commitment of support by their MLAs.

It`s not too early to ask them what that is.