Province deliberately leaving Metro Vancouver transit funding in limbo: expert

METRO VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Is the province deliberately trying to leave Metro Vancouver‘s push for transit funding in limbo?

Gord Price with SFU’s city program says with all of the province’s recent commitments to massive road and bridge projects — no plebiscite required — it’s clear cars, not buses and rapid transit, will be the vehicle around which our region is planned out.

“We’ve had some of the biggest commitments to roads, whether you’re looking at the Sea-to-Sky, or Highway 1, the Port Mann Bridge, widest bridge in the world, and now we have a commitment, just announced basically at the same time as the [transportation] referendum was required, that Massey be built, at this point a 10-lane bridge, which would quite amazingly put immense pressure on the agricultural land base south of the Fraser and land below sea level,” says Price. “I think that’s pretty astonishing. Then, a few weeks ago we saw a proposal for the Sea-to-Sky Connector, that would be around $5 billion I would think to get a road through the Coast Mountains and around Jarvis Inlet or major bridges over Howe Sound, to serve a population less than the West End of Vancouver.

“There are fair trade offs to be made here, but if what you’re saying is there’s nothing we’re going to do or can do about half the population of the province, and most importantly the vision that it’s had for itself, that if you’re going to build density, you have to do it around transit…I think everyone would agree in principle that no, a region can’t go forward like ours, one of the fastest growing in Canada, without a transit system that is equal to the job, and yet, basically the Premier is saying in that fabled headline from New York, ‘Metro Vancouver, drop dead.’ Either you take existing property tax and use it to fund a provincial responsibility, or really there’s nothing we can do other than force you to go ahead with another referendum, which at this point, you’re likely to lose. So, I don’t know where things are going to go, but at this point it doesn’t look good.”

While many people would rather take their car, from a planning perspective there is an efficiency problem with ignoring transit upgrades, according to Price.

“The mayor of Surrey has said, ‘if I had to build roads to handle the capacity of the growth we expect, it would deal with something under 20 percent of the demand,'” says Price.

The latest development we’ve seen is Peter Fassbender, the minister responsible for TransLink, telling the Mayors Council it won’t get control of the transit body.

And this week, Premier Christy Clark said the mayors’ desire to explore road pricing to raise funds for more transit would hypothetically have to go to a referendum, this despite pledging bucket loads of taxpayer dollars on roads and bridges without any vote beforehand.

“We really do seem to be stuck, and at this point you have to conclude it’s deliberate,” says Price of Metro Vancouver securing funding for transit. “It’s just speculation but I think it’s now valid because of the options that have been foreclosed on Metro Vancouver and moving forward on transit and transportation. This is a mechanism for limiting the capacity of local government, whether its taxes or services, or conversely it’s the province not wanting to have to make major commitments to transit.

“They clearly have an agenda. They want to move forward with major roads and bridges, whether that be Massey or even now, quite amazingly, an idea of building some kind of connector to the Sunshine Coast. That, I would say is a $5 billion project. But no money at this time to address concerns around transit or even city shaping in the case of Surrey.

“I think this is now pretty serious stuff. The vision of the region, if it can’t move forward around transit really isn’t valid any longer. It raises the question, what does the province, what does the premier, want for Metro Vancouver? What do they see its future as? If it’s not going to be built around transit in any significant way, and we’re going to have that other million people and another 600,000 vehicles, does the province care very much about Metro? At least in so much as it wants to address what’s at stake, which is really jobs and economic activity, as far as their agenda, and quality of life and ability to maintain much of what we’ve done successfully for so long.”

For Price, he seems a bit bemused at our situation, stating Metro Vancouver was once a region that other cities around the world looked to when making their own transit plans.

“We’re looking at the prospect of spending billions of dollars for major new bridges, just to handle a relatively small amount of the traffic in the Lower Mainland,” says Price. “The land implications are profound. It’s basically saying ‘we expect to see auto dependent urban growth occur wherever we build these major new bridges’ [that’s] certainly in the case of Massey. It’s bleak, isn’t it? It’s like saying, ‘we were doing it so well for so long. ‘We were the place that other parts of the world really looked to as a good example of how you deal with growth density and transportation.”

But with Premier Clark acknowledging voters have trust issues with TransLink, while Minister Fassbender says the mayors will not get control of the transit body’s board, Price wonders how there can be any meaningful change on this file.

“Why would her minister rule out that out? This is where we’re not getting a consistent message,” says Price. “This suggests to me that from a priority point of view, transit in Metro Vancouver is more of an annoyance than an actual policy commitment. It doesn’t seem to be thought out. Basically, so long as there has to be a referendum in the future that takes it off the agenda, in terms of having to develop policy. But more importantly, you don’t have to make any commitments in your budget. If that money doesn’t have to be spent, believe me there are other places they will spend it, and it will probably be on roads and bridges elsewhere in the province.”

Price says this stalemate could hurt the region’s economy, and even have impacts on the agricultural land reserve, with some farmland being needed for these various road projects.

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