The Federal government’s budget came down last week and it was called “Building a Strong Middle Class”. With that sentiment, the Federal Government provided 2.2 billion dollars for Greater Vancouver transportation projects including a Broadway subway, Surrey light rail and replacing the Pattullo Bridge. These are all part of the TransLink Mayors’ 10-year Greater Vancouver transportation plan.
Surprise! As reported in the Delta Optimist by Ian Jacques the Federal government didn’t provide any funding for the single-minded Provincial government support of the Massey Bridge, so the Province will have to pony up the $3.5 billion dollar estimated cost on their own.
The Province had one more salvo for Metro Vancouver mayors who have universally rued (except for the Mayor of Delta) the placement of this overbuilt Massey bridge in a location that will have dire ecological ramifications and is quite frankly in the wrong place for the region. The Province announced they will not be matching the Federal mass transit and transportation funding for Metro Vancouver. Nope. The cities still have to find a third of the funding.
Think about that-this is the Province that insisted on a Metro Vancouver referendum to fund transit despite the wishes of Metro Vancouver mayors. This was a 7.5 billion dollar plan, with one third each being provided by the Federal, Provincial, and Municipal governments IF voters accepted a 0.5 per cent infrastructure sales tax. That initiative was sounded defeated, with Transportation Minister Todd Stone victoriously concluding “We are very proud that we fulfilled our commitment to give the people of the region a voice”. At that time the Minister also stated “Doing nothing is simply not an option. The region is going to have to decide how it’s going to come up with its one-third of the cost.”
Is the funding missing for Metro Vancouver’s transit and transportation plan going towards the Massey Bridge? And where will the Province come up with the billions of dollars for the 2016 estimated cost of 3.5 billion dollars? Surely there is a less costly solution that could include mass transit and a smaller ecological footprint.
The province didn’t say: no funding. It said it wouldn’t match the federal amount. It has offered to fund one-third of the costs. Last week’s Globe & Mail article states that Minister de Jong noted that the province is already committed to pitching in 33 per cent.
Indeed. That leaves a mere 27% for the cities to find in their bloated budgets by trimming salaries & benefits (say 20-25% to private sector norms) and/or raise property taxes or parking fees. Where is the link to CUPE’s insistence on excessively paid employees by threatening strikes ? Where is the link to free parking all over the cities by our modern day squatters ?
Here’s one for the former and one for the latter:
http://www.torontosun.com/2016/12/10/were-paying-more-and-more-for-public-servant-compensation
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/free-parking-is-like-squatting/
The NDP said they will fund 40% of the major transit projects, which is in line with what the province takes out of the Metro’s enormous GDP via direct tax revenue. The Libs promised 33%, which means the locals have to fund 27% of the costs, or 17% more than local government earns from the Metro’s tax revenues. If the Libs win the election, the mayors and TransLnik will just have top suck it up, which translates into subsidizing the provincial funding share as usual.
It has been clear with the Libs pet projects (Massey for one) that they do not value Metro cities even though the provincial economy would collapse without them. The Libs pride themselves as sound fiscal managers, which is a joke considering the quality of their investment portfolio, much of it based on ignorance of the world economy or that will not see a return.
Rapid transit in the Metro is one of the premium investments any government can make by several measures. One is the huge stimulus it has on the development industry with all the related economic multipliers. Another is the additional resilience created in urbanism by moving people over cars, which is far less expensive and uses less energy and other resources like land on a per capita basis.
I’m happy to see this lining up as an election issue.
Quite right. The province did not say no funding. The province said it will fund 33%. The NDP says it will go 7% more, the Greens 33%, same as Libs.
It’s too bad for BC that the Trudeau government have committed to pay for the new $5 billion Champlain Bridge entirely, as well as pay for the running of it but are not giving any funding to our new bridges. Were they, this could free up more provincial funds for transit.
In fact, if the Mayors plan more transit and commit to it, the provincial dollars could go higher. The federal government has committed to a s fixed dollar number but the province has promised a percentage share, without any set limit.
The Champlain Bridge includes a rail line and joins two high-population areas. Massey does neither.
The Mayors and TransLink can ad a rail line to the Massey Bridge. It’s up to them.
Montreal doesn’t have an ALR blocking development and requiring homes further afield.
The tri-partite formula for transit funding has always had senior governments assuming the lion’s share. Massey is an unneeded provincial project. Southern Quebec has far more than a mere 4% arable land. In fact, Metro Montreal’s south shore communities are not only far higher in population and density that justifies a more diverse bridge project, but they are ringed by tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land.
Yes, those bucolic suburbs like Brossard and La Prairie have a golf course everywhere you look.
Next time you’re gorging on local cranberries remember to thank the Massey Bridge.
Eric if the bridge included another rail line I might support it
We should all press TransLink to consider rail over the bridge. Our local mayors are the ones that can decide.
Massey is a provincial project, just like the Port Mann mega bridge and freeway complex was. Both promised two lanes for rails. None were provided by the project proponents on the PM. Why should we believe them for Massey?
Given their commitment, the mayors would obviously supply a lot more transit everywhere they could if given the tools and resources. As it stands, the province restricts the most viable tools and resources while kicking the mayors in the teeth.
Montreal is special. It is
a) in Quebec
b) the home of the PM
c) the only truly bi-lingual city in Canada [ excl perhaps artificial Ottawa where this bilingualism mania originates ]
A “modest” federal deficit of a mere $100B+ in 4 years. Who cares about $5B for a bridge. Selfies look great from the upper deck !
At least Massey bridge will be tolled, not something we can expect Quebecers to pay.
Where’s the debate on the lopsided transfer payment system in Canada ?
The actions of Christy Clark’s government have been absolutely consistent. I think that they are indeed ideologically opposed to transit, and are deliberately blocking transit expansion.
One revealing bit of evidence is the wording change the Province imposed when they changed the transit referendum question, calling it the “Metro Vancouver Congestion Improvement Tax.” This wording (comprising 23% of the question’s 21 words) reframes the entire exercise. It states, in effect, that this is not about transit at all: it is about cars.
The trick in persuading someone is not to give them the answer (a mistake the Yes campaign made, by the way) but to frame the question. Decide the question – decide what this is about – and you decide the answer.
If car congestion is the question, what is the better answer – more buses, or a Massey bridge? What then is transit even for? Not for moving people around: it’s for freeing up road space. (It is telling that motordom advocates continually talk about trucks as though labour were not a factor of production.)
Whether this was a communication error, a result of ideological thinking, or a strategic choice, the referendum question itself laid the conceptual groundwork for the bridge and for freeway expansion.
The Yes side in the referendum spent $6 million, there was no opposition, except a tiny one-man band that spent piddly $40,000 and the massive Yes side couldn’t even articulate what it was all about? That’s a stretch.
The referendum question was not why the referendum failed. It failed because the public decided the referendum was about Translink, not transit. (Yes led in early polls, until the media and No campaign successfully reframed the vote.) And no, the Yes side was not able to set the agenda. Their communication strategy was a disaster.
But that’s not my point. My point is that the referendum question is revealing of the thinking of Christy Clark’s government.
TransLink shot themselves in the foot – on TV.
As the CBC reported, in the middle of the campaign!
“It’s a sad comment on the state of executive compensation that most Canadians can only dream of being a failed CEO.
Either you get fired with full salary for a year or more, or — like Vancouver’s former TransLink head Ian Jarvis — the same board of directors that found you lacking keeps you on as an “adviser” at roughly 10 times the national salary.
In a hastily arranged news conference, the board announced it would be removing Jarvis as head of Metro Vancouver’s beleaguered transit authority to “restore public confidence” on Wednesday.
“Heads you win and tails you win,” said Concordia business professor Michel Magnan.
Even by the gold-plated standards of the average CEO, business experts say TransLink’s deal with Jarvis is unusual. Jarvis will continue to draw his $422,000 annual salary …”
This released the brakes on a downhill run as we all tried to laugh at how we were all being taken for a ride. Later, the slashing and firing went on. As though they thought we wouldn’t notice.
One day the minutes of the meeting will come out, where it was decided to move Jarvis down the corridor for just a few hundred grand and hope nobody notices.
I’ve written about this before. You are right that this is the moment when the Yes side lost. By firing the CEO, Translink confirmed the No campaign’s framing. The firing made Translink the face of the campaign; made the issue Translink, not transit; implicitly admitted to wrongdoing; let their opponents see blood encouraging them to come back for more. All of this without the double salary issue, and without getting into any substantive debates about whether the salary was excessive, significant, etc. Even if all of that had been fine it *still* would probably have been a death blow.
At the time, I could hardly believe it. I don’t think I could have come up with a worse move if I tried. The decision was so obviously bad I can’t help wondering if it could have been deliberate (pressure from the Province?), but Hanlon’s Razor.
I cannot believe that not one intrepid reporter has looking into it to see what was being discussed and who was holding the gun. It had to be a vote by the TransLink board.
I think we can be absolutely certain that if the province had pressured the board to fire Jarvis that someone on the board would have declared ‘foul’.
This was a supreme blunder by the TransLink board. It must have been over some disagreement in strategy. Whatever it was, Jarvis was proved to be right.
This perfectly demonstrates that while the locals burned themselves, Christy fiddled according to a small-minded plan.
This is not about TransLink, it’s about building sustainable cities.
Cities have the tools to increase taxes ( property taxes, but also parking and a host of other fees) or create more cash by cutting spending, by trimming size and payroll for its bloated bureaucracies, for example, or by outsourcing. They chose not to and begger thy neighbor, the province. Blame shifting at its finest. The cities could and still can easily come up with the cash for more transit. It makes total sense for the provincial government, as one of very few in this formerly fine lands, to hold the line on deficits. The only other one is SK. Missing, as always, is a discussion on the core reasons, namely excessive salaries & benefits, the key culprit of high taxes and even higher deficits.
Thomas, the province removes money from our (city’s) economy and it is incumbent on them that we see a fair share of it spent here.What you are advocating is forcing us, in cities, to pay more (one way or another) so that the province can keep robbing us while they choose who to lavish the wealth on.
The money that goes to “bloated bureaucratic salaries” is mostly spent within the region, boosting our local economy, unlike the provincial robbery that may be spent on sweetheart deals to multinationals.
What is missing from your missive, Thomas, is the fact that the BC Libs have created artificial balanced budgets by transferring debt to the corporations, while also pulling “dividends” from them. That debt now tallies $645 billion.
Saskatchewan, ruled by arch-conservation Brad Wall, also created a balanced budget by — OMG! — raising taxes.
Cities in this country are unfortunately ruled by the provinces. And some provinces, like BC, love to sock it to ’em with needless financial and bureaucratic constraints and even outright mockery, all the while literally sucking them dry at the rate of 40% of tax revenue a year.
The only way for our cities to have the kind of taxation powers you propose is to make the Metro into an independent city-state and pull out of the province.
On to public sector workers. I sure hope you can develop an appreciation for a sewer worker being paid only $22 / hr while wading in your sh!t. If you want to complain about that so much, then run for office on a platform of breaking negotiated legal labour contracts, firing hundreds at city hall and various works yards and bringing in private workers at half the price and no training.
Run for office Thomas. Publish your mandate. And try to act professional while advertising your draconian policies.
Oops “…. 65 billion …”
The Liberals were honest, Alex. They said that any new tax would have to be approved by the citizens. The Mayors’ Council gambled that they could squeeze in a small tax for more money and they completely lost.
Instead of feeling embarrassed by their colossal mistake and misjudgement the Mayors, and you, decided to try and blame the Liberals, who kept their promise to the people.
It didn’t work then and it isn’t going to work now.
The referendum was imposed over the tiniest of taxes, then manipulated by the province from an illegitimate rationale: sound fiscal planning. Without a newly elected federal government to subsequently rescue transit, the results of a lack of transit would have led to urban decay and fewer jobs.
The province clearly does not understand what a good investment is, least of all transit projects with a proven huge return.
Sour grapes. The premier supported a Yes in the referendum. Your side rounded up everyone in the phone book to plead for a Yes but it fell completely flat. No amount of money could save the Yes side. Another outrageous thing was that the Yes side tried to buy votes using millions of dollars of the voters money. The people exercised the right they had been promised by the Liberals and could not be bought.
A classic David and Goliath story.
Altogether a complete disaster for the Mayors Council and TransLink.
If anyone turned the wine into vinegar, it was our wise premier. You keep harping on referendum winning vs. losing strategies, like transit is a pawn to be shoved around a board. In fact, she and her ministers, all of whom have their pinkies on the account access keyboard, now hide behind the referendum to continue down the well-trodden path of underfunding long-overdue transit in the Metro while overfunding excessive road infrastructure.
Christy may have supported Yes in public, but I’ll bet she smirked while saying it just like she did when defending her embarrassing additional pay and cash-for-access 5-star meals until even the lobbyists got fed up. She has no shame.
If you just count vehicles 1% of transit vehicles make up the traffic flow through the bridge. But if you count people (or tax payers), 26% travel through the tunnel by bus. 10% are HOV vehicles, meaning around 21% of people sharing a car. Or 47% (almost half) are in “shared” vehicles. This is quite high and one could argue doing something in the line of increasing transit or carpooling through the tunnel can help reduce the demand.
The origin-destination studies suggest 55% of tunnel trips (so I assume this is the share of people and not vehicles) in the morning rush (2011 data) go into Richmond. But I wonder how many of these are heading to Bridgeport station to get on Canada Line and head into Vancouver. If so, I wonder if adding more buses into Bridgeport would reduce vehicle volumes (both transit riders and drivers as there is a park and ride there).
Note that the GMT is beyond capacity for about 5 hours each day during commute times, with demands dropping to have the peak demand mid-day. Removing even 500 SOV vehicles for the peak-direction could have a significant impact on congestion (because once you hit saturation, every additional vehicle adds delays exponentially). This is equivalent to a combination of 5 buses (assuming you can fill them up to seating capacity, and can support return direction trips) and 125 new 2-person car-pools (per direction).
Sorry “bridge” should be “tunnel” and “demands dropping to have” should be “demands dropping to half”.
Another note: 125 more HOV vehicles is about 1-2% of the total HOV vehicles that go through the tunnel each day in one direction. Also assumes new transit riders all drove SOV previously.
Unfortunately, this is a moot point since the new bridge proposal has little to do with congestion and everything to do with larger ships going up river to a new airport fuel facility, Tilbury (LNG) and Surrey docks (thermal coal that no other port on the west coast will handle}. Also, port doesn’t want to pay for a new bridge so the BC Government has kindly offered to let the people of BC pay for it.
The tunnel has lots of life left in it and congestion problem could easily be solved by more transit and car pooling.
These are very salient points, Clark. And another way to illustrate the sheer hypocrisy of building ever more road space to solve a problem that wouldn’t exist by properly using the huge efficiencies of transit and ride sharing. Spatial geometry and land consumption should be used in transportation planning, but these seem to be a foreign language to the MoTH and the road-supportive politicos.
Arno, you summarized my comments nicely in one sentence. I just feel data and some facts (all publicly available) could be useful in these discussions. And important decisions should always look at alternatives (this is when the word “alternate” is actually good), which can find better candidate solutions, or reinforce the business case of the original solution.
I should point out that although more transit and carpooling efforts could help resolve congestion at the GMT, this does not mean the bridge should or should not be built. I am not a structural engineer and so I cannot comment on what seismic condition the tunnel is in and what life it has left in it. Nor can I comment on the need for a bridge for other reasons. I trust our elected officials will make proper and informed decisions as I understand the decision is a complex one that can go beyond simply congestion.
Clark, it is great that you are providing some reasoned and rational commentary. I agree that references should be provided to facts and data and we need look no further than a recent Price Tags article:
https://pricetags.wordpress.com//?s=kevin+falcon+massey&search=Go
Aside from evidence of port considerations being very important and that the tunnel had been seismically upgraded, this paragraph is also of interest:
It was in September 2013 that the Premier of the Province announced a new bridge, despite the fact that in 2006 then Minister of Transportation Kevin Stone Falcon had declared that the tunnel was good for another half century and with a new fast bus lane and the twinning of the Massey Tunnel the congestion challenges at peak hours would be alleviated.
Arno, yes I read about the 2006 declaration as to the fitness of the tunnel. The inconsistencies between different ministers overseeing the same ministry seems odd and there should be a simple answer to these inconsistencies, unless there are new reasons for the change within the 7 years since. As I feel they are beyond transport planning and engineering I don’t think I can add value.
However from a transport planning perspective, the reason I think a look at alternative modes should be made is because I do not think we can assume SOV rates will stay the same anymore. Furthermore, the Oak St. bridge can be worse northbound in the morning and more vehicles would exacerbate that situation. At times one could argue this part of “Hwy 99” is the weakest link. Consider that one of the main reasons for congestion associated with freeways are the networks that feed/receive the traffic. When these networks are signalized, this is the cause of the bottlenecks (as signalized intersections are essentially at 50% capacity at any given time for all demand…I like to think of an intersection as a “time-share”). So it may not just be the Oak St. bridge but the signalized arterial north of it.
And there are generally two polar ways you can deal with congestion: 1. increase supply or 2. reduce demand. Generally, increasing supply is easy, but expensive, while reducing demand is cheap, but difficult. As reducing person demand is not realistic in a growing region (although telecommuting can help), how do you reduce vehicle demand? By increasing the occupancy of people per vehicle. i.e. transit and carpooling are the best solutions at doing this and reducing vehicular demand. An adequate effort could curb the need for infrastructure investments for say another few decades.
It can happen because this was observed over a dozen years ago into the downtown core when vehicle trips reduced by about 4.9% while traffic across other regional screenlines grew by about 6.7%. Yet person trips went up into the downtown core due to SkyTrain and 98 B-Line (at the time). Our region is one of the few places where the core bloomed in terms of residential growth and socio-economic activity, while vehicular traffic dropped. So there is a strong local precedent for demand-based solutions that are cheaper and possibly not as difficult anymore given the increasing application and acceptance of transport pricing and technologies.
Outside of congestion, if one uses the rationale for jobs, supply solutions create an immediate intensity of temporary well-paying jobs, while demand solutions can create a more moderate number of jobs but over a longer term and therefore more permanent. Once you add autonomous vehicles into the mix, the argument for demand-based jobs reduces, but then again you may no longer need more capacity if one of the key objectives of autonomous tech is to reduce the demand for more capacity through shorter headways and must faster and coordinated reaction times.
Yes we should reduce demand by tolling or better transit but we also have to increase supply ie widen bottlenecks like Oak Street bridge, Lionsgate bridge or Massey Tunnel.
Generally underdiscussed is excessive spending of governments though, most of it (70%+) on wages and benefits. Before we ask for tax increases service delivery efficiencies have to be addressed. BC’s provincial and municipal agencies and quasi crown corporations are all equally guilt here of excess fat and excess pay Not just TransLink with overpaid bus drivers, managers and security personell. Also BC Ferries, ICBC, WCB, BC Liquorstores ( why is the BC government in the booze distribution business anyways ), cities, Parks, SFU, UBC ( where the minimum wage even for untrained food workers is over $20) BC Hydro etc ..
I agree with you, Thomas. Your suggestions of spending limited tax dollars (or extracting more tax dollars from limited wallets) to the most effective means of getting the best value for $ should be a simple principle applied. It is what we all use when we do our family budgets. However, I appreciate government budgets are much more complex and the lobbyists not as cute as their smaller domestic counterparts.
A key question (I consider questions to be portals to truth), is what do we value and how do we perceive this? Without making this into an advertisement, these are questions we just discussed at SFU’s Next Generation Transportation Certificate program. How we define our values, how we measure them, and how we use these criteria to compare the merit of alternatives (including status quo) is a simple yet sometimes overlooked initial step.
From this you could possibly see that yes maybe the North Shore should be prioritized first. Maybe it would reveal we need more transit, more bike lanes, or even more roads, including the locations and intensity of such solutions. This approach provides an objective, agnostic, and rational means at spending the money of others in a respectful, representative and transparent manner. Not to say current methods do not, but from my perspective it seems they do not consider a holistic enough purview (i.e. regional, provincial) but start at a project level.
This may sound all philosophical, but philosophy is the foundation of the principles we base our decisions on. The question is whether you have the right principles founded on the right philosophies. If not, the high-rise you are constructing, and all the debate about wallpaper and decor-details, is moot if the foundation is cracked.
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