From Alan Robinson:
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I’m dumbfounded as to how Translink has gained a bad reputation.
1) They are about the only transit agency I can think of in North America that sees riders as customers.
2) They’ve overseen dramatic growth in ridership and service since the late ’90’s
3) They run a tight ship (obvious if anyone’s actually read how the provincial audits. Their wording were heavily biased against Translink yet found next to nothing in actual waste or efficiencies.)
4) They activily find efficiencies (Canada Line P3 contract, low-cost community shuttle buses, “on the way” routes)
5) They’re incredably transparent (extensive public consultation, long term plans, Buzzer, blog, Twitter, etc…)
For constrast, take Chicago. We have three transit agencies that barely talk to each other, the ‘L’ has maintenance slow zone over about 1/3rd of it’s trackage, Metra can’t run it’s trains reliably during the winter, or at all mid-day. Busses are bunched reliably every day leaving half-hour or worse gaps in service on major routes. Farebox recovery is less than 50% and mode share is far worse than in Vancouver.
Let’s take Toronto. They also can’t manage to keep buses and streetcars running on time, haven’t yet committed to solving extreme congesting on their subway or surface transit, and are wasting a billion dollars on a politically motivated sub-par subway extension to the burbs.
New York can’t even build a subway station for less than $4 billion, let alone be able to run cross-town buses that you could out-walk.
Seattle definition of frequent service is a bus every 20 minutes, although they’re also struggling with the state over the ability to implement a local tax.
Why are people trashing one of the best transportation agencies in North America?
I’m glad Alan brought this up because as a transplant to Vancouver from Chicago, I am constantly awed by the hate piled on TransLink. People *still* complain about SkyTrain being stuck on the tracks for a few minutes a few months ago. In Chicago we called that “the morning commute.” Metro Vancouverites have a relatively stable and well-run transit system by North American standards. Cherish it (and vote yes!)
I can’t speak to the rest of the post but the trashing of Seattle bus service seems off. Metro has now rolled out the sixth rapid ride bus line over the last few years which are all either 10 or 15 minute frequencies. And as you can see from the following map
http://stb-wp.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Seattle15minMap_2014Nov.pdf
We actually have fairly good coverage for our 15 minute or less frequency lines.
For New York, I think Alan is referring to Fulton station. It costs $1.4B, connects more subway lines than the whole Canada has, handle alone more passenger that the whole Skytrain&Expo lines do, has to be open 24/h day… and eventually looks like it:
http://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/grimshaw-architects-fulton-center-transit-hub-new-york-designboom-X2.jpg
…but yes, it was over-budget (I don’t think it was a P3 either):
May someone remind us who is at the helm of this “messy” MTA? 😉
From what I have read on the Stephen’s Rees blog the Mayors council (the one ordering audit… ya remember?) could be the right place to ask the question and since you are at that, you could as well ask why the Translink commissioner office (the independent auditor), has been suppressed?
I finally think Alan was referring to the World Trade Center transit hub- Well it looks everything “World Trade Center” got out of control : I don’t think the MTA is involved in that,
I was refering to the WTC PATH station, but there’s plenty of other examples of poor capital program management from the MTA as well. The Second Avenue Sagas has both good coverage and a fitting title on the issue.
Sorry, I don’t mean to trash Seattle’s transit.
Seattle has good decision making, governance, and some of the best community discourse on the continent. However, Seattle suffers even more than Translink from political and operations funding problems, especially since the recession. I believe it makes a useful comparison.
I have no idea on exactly why people love to hate Translink but maybe it would interesting to measure whether people in Metro Van hate Translink more than other cities hate their own transit agencies.
After living in a handful of cities across Canada (and speaking to friends who live in others), I think I can safely say that Vancouverites are the biggest complainers in the country. It’s not limited to TransLink, though this is a particularly egregious example.
I agree. I think it’s neck and neck between TransLink and BC Ferries. Travel around a bit and you’ll see both systems are pretty good and relatively affordable compared to many others. If others are cheaper, dig deep and you’ll find some government or agency is ultimately subsidizing them. Either way you pay one way or another
We don’t just trash talk translink, we trash talk bike lanes, the rain, the hot sun, the snow, the ongoing highrise developments…
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Please blame bateman, and the sun, province, global and ctv for listening to him.
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Blame the field of journalism (and frances bula) for teaching journalists to “get all sides of the debate”.
I don’t know… those people/organizations all exist across the country. Vancouver’s got something special going on.
The thing is our weather is too nice compared to the rest of canada. We don’t need to complain about flooding, -30 temperatures, or blizzards. Even montrealers preach the wonderfulness of our transit system.
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It won’t be long til the media catches on to this: http://www.taxpayer.com/news-releases/ctf-launches-no-translink-tax-campaign
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It’d be nice if Canada were less socialist and more like China: we’d have many times more subways by now.
Alan, wrote this exact same post on December 14th. As then I replied, in part, fare evasion is endemic and also, and importantly, associated with violence. Many people would not allow themselves, their spouse, their parents or their children to travel on Translink buses because of the repeated stories of aggressive and violent riders that refuse to pay and often assault drivers. This, obviously, then extends to the rail system.
To better understand the financial cost of this fare evasion one has to factor in the lost revenue from those that just will not take transit because of the ignored crimes and criminals on board. On top of the 5-7 million a year lost (Translink has suggested possibly $18 million lost) you must add millions more because of potential passengers that wouldn’t dream of taking transit. Whether the fear is realistic or proportional is irrelevant. The losses are facts. Hundreds of thousands of people will not take transit as long as criminals are allowed to roam on the system unhindered.
We must consider the Broken Windows Policy that was rigorously applied in New York City where they implemented zero tolerance of fare-dodging, and rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years.
Another associated reason is explained by Alan’s link to Anrew Coyne’s SFU presentation. Translink always goes after vehicle drivers for funding. Andrew Coyne cogently and repeatedly explains why this approach is wrong. Transit must be viable on its own.
I feel I have to spend a few minutes refuting this post, though I don’t hope to be dragged into a long-term debate here: I only hope that you’ll take this seriously.
I really do believe the only people who could say that transit is completely unsafe are people who do not use the system, because it really is so far out of whack. I have ridden the system on and off my entire life, and I’ve had one incident in which I felt physically threatened. That’s fewer incidents than I’ve had actually walking around on streets. This idea that you are somehow more unsafe on Translink than on a street is absurd.
Of course, you say that’s not the point and irrelevant, it’s the perception that counts, but anyone who believes that Translink is unsafe now isn’t going to suddenly change their mind if there are turnstiles. An irrational fear of transit is not going to suddenly become less irrational once turnstiles are put in. There will simply be a new reason to fear it.
But I highly, highly doubt as many people hold this view as you suggest, and you’ve given us nothing to base that belief upon aside from complete speculation. There’s no polls to suggest so many people are refusing to ride transit for that reason, let alone forcing their poor parents into buying a car (how exactly does that work, anyway?). Much more likely they’ve just chosen what they feel makes the most sense for their needs, and given better service on transit or more congestion on roads they would switch, as thousands did following the construction of the Canada Line. Of course, if we subsidize roads with several more multi-billion dollar freeway bridges, they might switch back.
(Not to mention, the cost of faregates at $171 million and their ongoing maintenance is far higher than the amount of money lost to fare evaders. But that’s a whole other story)
As for the Broken Windows theory, this theory has as many holes as those windows it tries to clean up:
1: crime in New York City started dropping before the introduction of this new program.
2: crime dropped across the United States and Canada in this period, and continues to do so, despite the fact that New York City was really the only major police station putting this theory into practice.
3: Researchers have found little evidence that disorder causes crime, rather that disorder and crime have similar social and economic causes.
That last one might be refuted in other studies, I’m not sure, but the first two are irrefutable facts. I’ll leave you to research this topic on your own, but you really ought to re-research it, and look for critical information. The evidence is firmly stacked against the efficacy of this theory.
Finally, transit can be viable on its own the day that driving is viable on its own. We’ll collect 100 per cent of transit costs at the farebox the same day all bridges and roads are tolled to pay for 100 per cent of their construction and upkeep costs. Even on the Golden Ears Bridge and the new Port Mann Bridge, that’s not happening now: those tolls do NOT pay all the costs of those bridges, and they have to be subsidized by, you guessed it, Translink. The same organization that you accuse of going after drivers too much, which also happens to serve drivers.
Also, drivers benefit from transit too: I’d suggest you look here to see what Vancouver would look like without any transit: http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/taylors-analysis-manhattan-without-transit/.
And lastly: this last tax increase that people will be voting on soon isn’t targeting drivers, or anyone from that matter: it’s about as fair and economically sustainable a tax increase as you can possibly get. What’s not to love about that?
Honestly, if the PST were to increase by 5% it wouldn’t affect me at all.
I have done the research on the Broken Windows Theory. There’s quite a bit here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5908/1681.abstract
It’s a bit like street lights. We know that street lights deter crime; don’t we?
Nevertheless, I am convinced that when we repeatedly hear that another bus driver has been assaulted we can be sure that many people are glad they never take a bus and hope to never do so either. Perception and ripple effect. Yesterday I heard of a woman that postponed her trip to Australia because of the hostage situation in the Lindt Café in Sydney. Be sure she is not alone. Perception, again. Perceptions are far from irrelevant, no matter how stupid or irrational when citizens vote. Another perception is that drivers are constantly being hit on for cash to pay for transit that is free for some.
Andrew Coyne says that transit should pay for itself and drivers should pay for the roads. Seems fair.
“It’s a bit like street lights. We know that street lights deter crime; don’t we?”
No, it has nothing to do with street lights, except that they’re both crime theories. I guess elephants are a bit like microbes, because after all they’re both alive. I’m guessing you didn’t bother looking up critical research, because otherwise you would have focused your arguments to address those points, that there is no evidence that the broken windows theory of policing actually caused the crime decline in New York (let alone the entire United States and Canada, where crime also declined equally quickly without that theory being put into practice).
“Nevertheless, I am convinced that when we repeatedly hear that another bus driver has been assaulted we can be sure that many people are glad they never take a bus and hope to never do so either. Perception and ripple effect.”
Again, you’re speaking purely from speculation. If you really think so many hundreds of thousands of people are refusing to ride transit because of crime, then where is the statistics to back that up? I’m not saying the issue doesn’t exist at all, but it’s not the primary reason people don’t take transit.
So I’ll speculate here too: Berlin has no turnstiles on the u-bahn, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in Germany, and yet the Berlin metro, like Skytrain of course, is packed full. The city has a 26 per cent mode share for public transit as far as I can tell, higher than Vancouver though not by too much, and 32 per cent mode share for private cars: http://www.lta.gov.sg/ltaacademy/doc/J11Nov-p60PassengerTransportModeShares.pdf
Is there something innately different between Germans and Canadians that allow Germans to ride trains without turnstiles and prevents Canadians from doing so? Or maybe these sorts of trends are primarily driven by other factors, such as convenience, density, frequency, capacity, cost, etc. If transit becomes more convenient, frequent, cheaper or simply has the capacity whereas driving doesn’t, then more people will use it. But for that we need funding, just as the road network needs funding in order to increase capacity.
“Andrew Coyne says that transit should pay for itself and drivers should pay for the roads. Seems fair.”
I haven’t watched the video, but if he’s proposing that then kudos. But that if you think getting a transit tax passed is political suicide, wait til you see a politician propose tolling every road, or having mileage-based costs for driving, in order to pay for existing maintenance costs. I doubt most people realize how expensive roads really are to provide.
It’s common knowledge that a ticket on the bus in Vancouver is merely an option. Drivers repeatedly tell us this. If you are caught without a ticket, or with an unvalidated one in Berlin, you will get a €40 on the spot fine.
If you cant pay the fine, you will be taken to an ATM, or the police will be called.
Berlin is possibly the most densely populated city in Europe.
Translink has announced that it will implement a pilot project to install bus driver barriers on a number of Coast Mountain buses to protect its employees from violent assaults by unruly passengers.
The move follows Translink’s “Don’t Touch The Operator” campaign, which was launched in March to combat the increasing number of assaults on bus drivers. As of July 31, the number of assaults on operators in 2014 totalled 65.
Perhaps it would be useful to watch the video. It was a presentation of the SFU City Program.
If transit police catch you in Vancouver, you get a ticket. Paying the fare is hardly optional.
“Berlin is possibly the most densely populated city in Europe.”
Not quite. But it’s exactly my point that there are other things behind ridership numbers than what you claim to be the biggest problem facing Translink.
Hear hear, Tessa. Great rebuttal. Eric, I agree with you that the politics of perception is a scourge and a tragedy. But repeating that crime on transit is a problem will not help to solve the problem. Let’s see the statistics.
METRO VANCOUVER — TransLink says more fare evaders are paying their tickets because of the risk of higher fines later on or the loss of their driver’s license.
Yet the majority are still not coughing up.
Latest figures from the transportation authority suggests about 39,000 tickets were issued to passengers caught riding transit without a valid fare between September 2012 and thus far in 2014.
Only 11,000 tickets, or 29 per cent of those, have been paid, said spokeswoman Jiana Ling. Another 28,200 tickets remain outstanding, while 180 were thrown out.
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Those that want to win this referendum need to work hard on changing the perceptions that many people have regarding lost revenue at Translink.
Bravo Tessa!
Sorry, don’t have a ready link, but I did read a study once that illuminated the fact that lighting may actually make a bad situation in isolated public spaces worse by lighting the victims from afar, and made it easier for criminals to count their money and assets of their trade. The real problem isn’t with lighting, it’s with isolation versus active spaces. Busy public spaces are safer than isolated spaces.
Regarding Broken Windows, I’ve read enough rebuttal over the years to put that one to rest. It was an ingenious tactic to garner support from conservative voters to increase taxes and fund larger police budgets when crime in NYC was coming off a peak. But the kicker is that the “success” of the policy took advantage of a concurrent societal decline in crime internationally that related to several things, notably the fact that single males of the Boomer generation entered middle age, started families and assumed greater responsibility for their lives.
Eric, I was disgusted by your rant about transit and crime. It is fear-mongering, pure and simple. I doubt that the rate of crime on the transit system is greater than the amount of crime on sidewalks, in parking lots, or in public places like shopping malls and libraries. It is just that the news media love a sensational story to do with crime.
Fear mongering is suggesting that something is likely when it may well not be. I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that public perception that there are safety risks on the buses is elevated when people hear about crime. I’m not saying there’s crime. I’m saying that people hear about crime and will stay away. Again, today there was a member of the Coast Mountain Bus Driver’s union on CBC radio describing the new driver protection cages. Is CBC fear mongering or reporting on improved safety for bus drivers?
As long as criminals assault bus drivers and are given sentences considered by many to be far too light, then people will say and imagine that the criminals are out there – and on buses and trains.
The Province:
“In the 12 months Charles Dixon has waited for justice, 140 of his fellow bus drivers have been assaulted.
Dixon desperately wants to drive again — but has serious emotional scars from a Feb. 15, 2010 assault, a case that will now not be resolved until April 3.
Twenty other drivers and union boss Don MacLeod came to Vancouver Provincial Court Tuesday hoping to hear a public message from the courts that it’s not OK to beat on drivers.
“There have been 140 assaults on our drivers,” said MacLeod, president of Canadian Auto Workers 111, which represents the drivers. “What we need is a deterrent.”
I may vote yes, in the referendum. Someone should conduct a comprehensive survey, not just one of those silly group-think Insight ‘opt-in and win points!’ surveys, on attitudes to municipal transit travel.
I find all the grannies and kids on the Canada Line very threatening indeed.
I don’t bash TransLink.. but I’m a reporter that does transit news around the Lower Mainland. Inevitably, there are negative stories that seem to really rile people up. And like you say in your post, the good transparency at many levels at TransLink makes it easy for reporters to find stories about them, many of them negative stories. Sort of goes in a circle – publish negative story about TL, people react, making it ‘newsworthy’ to look into the organization further. In any case, the positive stories I write about TL get much less attention than the negative.
Transparency is good governance but poor politics.
Since you live in Chicago that must be a quote from Boss Daley.
TransLink does a generally great job BUT re: the Chicago comparison and bus bunching… TransLink is a poor performer. Almost every electric trolley route is reliably bunched all day. You’ll get three buses within five minutes and then nothing for 45 minutes. Constantly.
The form of every translink complaint:
“Translink does a great job at ___[something related to buses/skytrains]____ BUT they really need to fix their
______[something about messy/empty/full/unreliable/honking buses]___ and their
______[something about stupid translink employees]______ and their
______[something about fares/funding/high taxes]______ and their
______[something about wasteful spending, bureaucracy & lack of transparency]_______.
Why are we comparing against inferior service though? When you get your report card back, does your parent tells you that you’re good enough because you are smarter than the last placed student in class?
I argue we need a better metric when compare public transport system. If you want to view Translink as a Top-tier world class system, then we need to compare them to other world class transport systems right now. We need to compare ours with the systems in London, Hong Kong, Japan, etc. I mean, which would you think of when one is asked of having a better public transport system, Chicago or Tokyo?
Being the best among the all the crap systems does not mean we are any good at all. Look at our “ComPass” cards, how come our system is still in limbo, wasting millions of dollars, when London, Hong Kong and Japan and other countries have been reliably using this payment system for 10+ years? This isn’t even a new technology!
There are ingredients in all of those cities that Vancouver simply doesn’t have, and likely never will based on it’s size, shape, density and history.
Compared to many of those cities Vancouver is piddly. The network effect is massive in cities with huge populations. It’s not Translink’s fault that much of the city is of a density that is less than ideal for rapid transit. In a larger city most people are likely to be near rapid transit on both ends of most trips, enabling those huge riderships and huge capital projects.
Unlike London or Tokyo or even Seattle, Vancouver is a terminal, not a hub. There’s some traffic that goes to the island, but it’s insignificant to the the activity of the city. That means all infrastructure built here has to be self supporting in terms of demand. Railways were built to connect the country to our ports, not to whisk people from neighboring cities through town and out the other side. This means that the city didn’t grown in patterns that left many corridors open to rail use, and effective transit. Geographically, Vancouver is a bunch of cul-de-sacs, which doesn’t make for lots of service co-ordination and cost sharing.
This means that the city didn’t grown in patterns that left many corridors open to rail use, and effective transit. Geographically, Vancouver is a bunch of cul-de-sacs, which doesn’t make for lots of service co-ordination and cost sharing.
I disagree. Vancouver, most of the Burrard Peninsula and many older suburbs were built on a grid platted by the CPR. Grids predate suburban cul-de-sacs by a half century and are very efficient for transit and traffic management. They still get congested, but they are nothing like the arterials heavily laden by traffic pouring in from the adjacent dead end cul-de-sacs. The original railway lines were linear and followed the banks of the Fraser River. The BC Electric Interurban lines were also linear, hence the Expo Line and much of the Millennium Line.
I really don’t understand how you could possibly get Vancouver’s geomatics so wrong.
It was an analogy. Rail lines in Vancouver are mostly dead ends.
Isn’t it wonderful that we have a transit system that we can even consider comparing with the likes of London or Hong Kong. Translink isn’t perfect, but we wouldn’t even be thinking of such comparisons with the transit mode share and connectivity we had 20 years ago.