There is utter pathos in this news item as it seems to be the only news worthy story the mainstream media can say about the RAV/Canada Line, that it’s delivering 15,000 gambling addicted people, by metro, to the River Rock Casino each week. Did we spend a nearly $3 billion metro just to deliver more people to a casino? The RAV/Canada line was supposed to take 200,000 car trips a day off local roads and instead of attracting the all important motorist from the car (the commuter), the metro is giving gamblers a faster trip to lose their money.
There has been absolutely no hint that the RAV/Canada Line has achieved any degree of modal shift from car to transit, as claimed ridership only shows that previous bus passengers are still using the new metro service and this news item continues the shameful way the mainstream media reports local transit news.
Canada Line delivers 15,000 extra visitors a week to River Rock casino
By Brian Morton, Vancouver SunNovember 19, 2009
METRO VANCOUVER — The River Rock Casino Resort is making it much easier for gamblers to spend their money.
As part of a $30-million renovation, gamblers and other visitors can now get off at the Canada Line’s Bridgeport Station and walk directly to the casino via a new covered walkway (called the Starwalk) to the resort’s third floor. The Starwalk is also linked to the adjoining parkade and bus loop.
Once in the resort, customers hop on a first-of-its-kind-in-Canada spiral escalator that drops them on the doorstep of dozens of slot machines and gaming tables.
It appears to be a smart business move, with up to 15,000 extra customers heading to the casino each week following the opening of the Canada Line in August.
“We’ve seen a 15-per-cent increase in guests since [the Canada Line] opened,” Howard Blank, River Rock’s vice-president of media, entertainment and responsible gaming, said in an interview Thursday. “And we think this will grow with this renovation. There’s a lot of older folks from Oakridge, Kerrisdale and Yaletown who didn’t want to drive here. And there’s also a lot of the [younger] hip crowd coming here [via the Canada Line] so they can drink and not have to drive.
“The majority of our guests now come from the Canada Line.”
The 18-month renovation included not only the Starwalk — which incorporates an autowalk (a flat, moving escalator) and voice recordings from stars who have played there — but four private VIP suites (each holding up to 20 guests, with one dedicated to Vancouver musician Dal Richards) at the River Rock Show Theatre. There are also restaurant upgrades and a new lounge.
A tour of the facility by The Vancouver Sun Thursday featured two escalators which, unlike traditional escalators, traverse two floors in a 180-degree circular span — a major change from the stairs that preceded them — and required seven months to assemble, install and test. The spirals were delivered from Japan in seven separate truss sections and installed by Mitsubishi.
“The escalators were very important,” added Blank, who noted that there are no other spiral escalators in Canada. “It gives us a grand atrium [and] it opens up our lobby and allows us to expand our ballroom. We thought it was important to separate us from other hotels and casinos. We’ve seen them in Macau and we’re one of the very few in North America.”
As well, the expansion includes a number of retail areas and community and transit policing offices. Also recently opened was a 1,512-vehicle parkade, a joint venture between the Canada Line and River Rock.
Meanwhile, Blank said that so far there haven’t been any problems at River Rock related to petty criminals or drug dealers who often utilize a rapid transit line to commit crimes.
“People of ill repute won’t come here,” he said. “We haven’t had any problem here at all. There’s a community policing station opening shortly [and] we have a huge security presence. And we also have so many security cameras here.”
After a ceremony held on 14 November, the 9.6-km Gold light rail line extension from Union Station to East Los Angeles (Atlantic Boulevard) opened to the public with a free fares offer on 15 November. 50 000 passengers turned up to try the new service, which links with the existing Gold Line from Union Station to Pasadena. The USD $898 M project brings the Los Angeles light rail system to 126 km (three lines).
Already under construction is the city’s next new light rail, the Expo Line, while more is planned. However the proposal to award AnsaldoBreda a contract for 100 more LRVs (to join the 50 they are already delivering, late) has foundered because the Italian company did not want to sign up to the financial guarantees requested by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. A competitive tender will now be issued for the next batch of new trams.
This post marks the 300th posting on the Rail for the Valley Blog and congratulations to (now) Dr. John Buker for all his efforts with the valley rail project. When John asked me to post for the RFV blog, I don’t think he expected such a “stormy petrel“. I have tried hard to keep the blog current on rail projects around the globe, as well, inform local enthusiasts of the history and application of modern public transit.
Our readers responses to the various posts are informative and very welcome.
The RFV blog is just not a local blog, but we also have many international readers and not just in the USA, but in the UK, Finland, Russia, and elsewhere, which continues my task to keep postings interesting.
There is going to be some changes in the New Year, with more posts from guest contributers, to give a different opinion on transportation in the region. As well, the new year will bring some very interesting events, which will make Rail For The Valley front and centre for the Return of the Interurban debate in the Fraser Valley. 2010 will be a good year for valley transportation.
There is a current push to implement Road Pricing or Road Tolls in the region by various levels of government, to help fund public transit. The problem is, Road pricing or tolling will not work unless there is a viable public transit alternative in place. There isn’t and road pricing will fail and those politicians who implemented Road Pricing will face electoral oblivion.
The problem is the region doesn’t have a viable public transit alternative as the present bus/SkyTrain light-metro model has failed to attract the motorist from the car, or more simply buses do not attract ridership. We have squandered over $8 billions of dollars to date on light-metro, where 80% of its ridership must first take a bus to use. Instead of three disjointed light-metro lines, the region could have had over nine light rail lines, serving more destinations; more destinations means a more attractive transit service. Nine LRT/streetcar lines translates in almost twenty-seven actual light rail routes, providing a network that would provide the incentive for the all important car driver to use.
We must also remember that road pricing isn’t as well received as many promoters here would have us think, even London’s Congestion Tax is not working as well as many would have us think, as congestion is again approaching pre-tax levels and goods and services have increased within the congestion zone as the cost of the tax is downloaded onto the consumer. Also kept secret is the amount of subsidy paid to businesses within the congestion zone who could show a loss of business to the new tax.
In Manchester, voters rejected a comprehensive road pricing scheme by a large margin, leaving transportation planning in tatters.
In theory, road pricing and/or congestion charging looks good, but in the real world there are many problems to overcome. For the METRO region, road pricing or congestion charging will only work if there is a viable public transit alternative and again, buses are not a viable alternative. Only when the METRO region adopts and offers a large light-rail, streetcar or trams network of 300 km. or more, will road pricing be accepted.
If not, woe to the politicians who forces this on to the public.
Jon Ferry has a go at TransLink in today’s Province and proposes that METRO Vancouver run the regional transit system. Sorry Jon, that will just perpetuate the incompetence that we have all grown to hate at TransLink. The problem with TransLink, aside with provincial interference, is an extremely dated transit modal, based on building very expensive ’spinal’ metro lines and feeding them with buses. The problem is that buses have proven very poor in attracting the all important motorist from the car, so when all is said and done, the dated ‘metro’ philosophy just gives present bus riders a somewhat longer, very much more expensive, and inconvenient trip. This tends to drive the more affluent bus customers back to their cars!
TransLink, like BC Transit before, has given us excuses, invention, and extremely questionable statistics, to keep on planning and building, what has proven not to work. Isn’t interesting, that SkyTrain and it’s brother light-metro, has been largely rejected by knowledgeable transit planners around the world who prefer to build with modern light rail (LRT) instead.
Here is the bottom line with TransLink’s transit woes. Calgary’s LRT system, which carries more passengers a day than our two SkyTrain lines, has cost under $1 billion to date. Compare this with our two SkyTrain Lines which cost about twice as much to operate annually and to date has cost the taxpayer $6 billion. We are spending at least six times more money to carry the same passenger loads and for added insult, at double the cost wiyh our driverless SkyTrain light-metro!
The RAV/Canada line is more of the same!
What is needed is a duly elected TransLink Board, with one member elected from each city and municipality, every three years coinciding with the regular civic elections. By doing so, the public would have a truly democratic organization that would be able to provide the oversight so desperately needed by an out of touch bureaucracy.
Yet, every time someone advocates having an elected TransLink Board, there are howls of protest from region politicians of “how undemocratic it is”. To make TransLink functional, we need public oversight and there is no better public oversight than a duly elected TransLink Board.
No one seems to know who is running TransLink
Responsibility should be turned over to Metro Van
By Jon Ferry, The Province November 16, 2009
The key thing in any organization, whether military or civil, is to have clear lines of command. You need to know who to call when there are problems.
The way TransLink is governed is more like a maze, similar to the one in the horror movie The Shining.
As provincial comptroller- general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland points out in a devastating critique, our regional transportation agency has an “excessive” number of executives and suffers from a “lack of clarity” that’s “compounded by the conflicting interests” involved, including Victoria.
Who really runs TransLink is as hard to figure out as how to spell Wenezenki-Yolland’s name. It has an unelected board. It also has a mayors’ council, a regional transportation commission, a screening panel for nominating board candidates . . . you get the idea.
It’s a structure only a mother could love. And in this case, the mother was former transportation minister Kevin Falcon. He got tired of the interminable bickering of the old TransLink board and decided to replace it, with one that was worse.
So in 2007, a new board came into being, which pays itself well and likes to meet behind closed doors. As founding TransLink chairman George Puil told me: “The way it’s governed now, or has been, there’s no transparency there at all.” Did I say maze? Yes, the governance system is as confusing to me as the Mary Hill Bypass. No wonder TransLink CEO Tom Prendergast resigned after just 15 months on the job. The prospect of running New York City’s transit authority must seem like child’s play.
TransLink must get back on the democracy bus, and start being run by those who are elected and accountable . . . folks you can phone if you have to.
Puil, who was a Vancouver city councillor for many years, notes that the issue of how TransLink is set up has been batted around for a long time. I’d suggest sorting it out once and for all by turning TransLink over to Metro government.
After all, Metro Vancouver, the former GVRD, already runs our water, sewer and other utilities. And it won’t be too long, I believe, before it runs a regional police force.
In other words, it’s time for TransLink finally to throw off its provincial shackles and say hello to MetroLink. That’s the name I’ve come up with for a Metro transportation agency that’s directly answerable to the people who pay for it, through their elected regional politicians.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson agrees this idea is definitely worth considering.
“It’s neither fish nor fowl right now,” Robertson said, “and it’s not serving the region nearly as well as it should.” The next big question would be how to get MetroLink to balance its books without having to constantly dream up wildly unpopular new taxes and levies, as TransLink does now.
The first place to start would be to trim its management ranks, run a leaner and more efficient bus service and, of course, curb wholesale fare cheating.
First, though, we have to straighten out the maze.
The Seattle monorail was to open in 2009; it didn’t.
The Simpson’s monorail song, which Seattle’s monorail lobby successfully kept off the airwaves in the weeks leading up to the public ballot on the project.
The Rail For The Valley’s most viewed blog post is “Seattle’s monorail versus LRT debate – Same story, different players!”, http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/seattles-monrail-versus-lrt-debate-same-story-different-players/ which at first glance is a little puzzling, but when one understands the massive public debate over the proposed Seattle monorail, it is not surprising at all that there is still much interest South of the boarder.
In Vancouver, there has never been a real public debate about ‘rapid‘ transit, as the decision for every one of Vancouver’s three metro lines was made by the provincial government, strictly for political reasons and as such, any debate on transit mode, route, etc., would lead to political embarrassment. Simply, no real debate was allowed. The mainstream media is prompted to report positively about SkyTrain and the RAV/Canada line with large advertising accounts for obliging news outlets. Be negative about transit and TransLink and no advertising money for you. Don’t believe Zwei; go ask Charlie Smith and the Georgia Straight.
In Seattle, the US nature of funding ‘rapid’ transit construction with long term bonds encourages public debate, culminating with an electoral initiative, where the taxpayer could approve or reject ‘rapid’ transit construction by ballot.
It is this process of public debate that has attracted more interest in public transit in the USA and is much harder for politicians to ram through pet projects. More people in the Seattle area have taken part in local transit debates than their Vancouver counterparts and thus there is more interest in transit issues down South.
Currently there is a publicennui with transit planning as they are kept from the planning process and only involved when TransLink or the provincial politicians want a media event for photo-ops. There is a complete disconnect between the public and transit planning as it is seen as a ‘mom and apple pie’ issue and any ‘rapid’ transit is good ‘rapid’ transit and the cost of providing ‘rapid’ transit is kept from the public, lest the public wakes up and finds that proposed ‘rapid’ transit plans are dated and unfordable.
A good part of TransLink’s present financial woes stem from building light-metro at two to four times more than light rail – building more SkyTrain will only increase taxes and debt, but the taxpayer knows very little because no real debate has been allowed by politicians and bureaucrats. The result: The public in Greater Vancouver remain ‘out of the loop’ and treat transit expenditures as a ‘fait accompli’.
The Light Rail Committee has long supported the reinstatement of the Vancouver to Chilliwack interurban service and has long corresponded to transportation experts in Europe and the USA, who also support the return of the interurban.
The concept of TramTrain, where specially designed streetcars or diesel light rail vehicles can safely ‘share the track’ with regular railways, has never been explored by TransLink, who prefer to squander billions of dollars building the SkyTrain metro system on routes that do not have the ridership to support the mode. It is all so easy for TransLink, grab taxes from valley residents and spend it on SkyTrain and subways in Vancouver.
For almost 20 years the city of Karlsruhe, Germany has operated a large and ever growing TramTrain network (the longest route is 210 km) and the success of TramTrain is such that over 20 cities around the world, including Paris, France, now operate TramTrain Lines.
It is cheap to build, with costs starting at about $7 million/km to build; compare this with SkyTrain, with costs surpassing $100 million/km.
In an age of ‘global warming,’ the need is to build a large network for the region and the question is: Do we build with LRT and TramTrain with costs starting at $7 million/km or SkyTrain metro, with costs starting at $100 million/km.
From the “Tip of the Iceberg Department”; the RAV/Canada Line is going to cost TransLink money but until the BC Auditor General has a go at TransLink, SkyTrain and RAV, the public will never know the true costs of the new subway or of TransLink’s metro operation.
The $14 million to $21 million shortfall mentioned is just on the $300 million or so P-3 part of the project and TransLink’s portion of the metro and does not include the annual debt servicing costs of the over $1 billion in senior government money invested in the subway. If TransLink’s appeal of Susan Heyes lawsuit fails and hundred of other affected merchants sue, TransLink’s shortfall for the RAV/Canada Line will increase dramatically.
What is so ‘Joesph Goebbels’ about the piece is the term “strong ridership” – 83,000 passengers a day is not strong ridership for a subway, or metro! 83,000 passengers a day is really very poor ridership when compared to the at least 400,000 passengers a day that is needed to justify the investment on an almost $3 billion subway! Again, in METRO Vancouver, mediocre SkyTrain and metro performance is perverted by TransLink, through the mainstream media, as success.
The final insult is the quote: “The indication is that the line is attracting more car drivers because 79 per cent have access to a private vehicle for the trip compared with 66 per cent of riders overall. Three in 10, or 29 per cent, were not regular users of transit.”
TransLink, like BC Transit before, never asks a question that the answer can’t be twisted to suit its own ends; instead of asking: “Have you switched from car to transit“, which would have given a definite answer (an answer that TransLink may not like); asks the nebulous “Do you have access to a car?“, there by assuring a very hazy answer that can be easily manipulated.
What the news article failed to mention is that the RAV/Canada Line is force fed almost 40,000 bus passengers a day (which equals almost 80,000 trips as transit customers travel there and back), transit customers that once took direct buses from Surrey, Delta, Richmond to Vancouver, as well many bus customers on Cambie St. The new metro has probably increased transit ridership on the route by about 10%, but is this number attributed to students using the deep discounted U-Pass or a slight modal shift from car to transit. As RAV/Canada Line has no turnstiles and relies on laser counters that lose reliability in congested locations, ridership on the RAV/Canada Line nay be distorted by as much as 15%. Politely not mentioned is the airport portion of the line that despite initial hype and hoopla, is ignored. Recent polling by YVR and independent sources, indicate that very few airline customers are using the metro and almost no one is taking RAV to shop at the airport.
The RAV/Canada Line is full of stories, if only the mainstream media care to dig a little.
Canada Line to lose millions each year despite strong ridership
Shortfall of $14m to $21m per year till 2025
By Frank Luba, The ProvinceNovember 12, 2009
The new, $2-billion Canada Line will lose between $14 million and $21 million per year until 2025.
That’s despite the fact the line is rapidly approaching the 100,000 riders per day on which the project was based.
The information was contained in a report by provincial comptroller-general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland concerning TransLink and B.C. Ferries, which was released last week.
While the report chided TransLink and the mayors’ council for not addressing the Lower Mainland transportation authority’s funding shortfall sooner, it acknowledged that TransLink was burdened with services where costs will be much higher than revenue for a long time.
“For example, the cost of operating the Canada Line [net of bus-fleet operating efficiencies] is expected to exceed the additional system revenue it generates until 2025, with costs exceeding incremental revenues by $14 million to $21 million for most years until then,” wrote Wenezenki-Yolland.
TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie said the costs are partially the result of how the public-private partnership deal was structured to pay off more than $700 million put into the project by builder InTransitB.C.
“It costs less to pay more up front,” said Hardie. “It’s like paying off your mortgage earlier.” New Democratic Party transportation critic Harry Bains (Surrey-Newton) blamed the decision to build the Canada Line as a public-private partnership on the government’s “ideological” support of P3s.
Bains said the Canada Line deal is one of the reasons for TransLink’s ongoing need to raise more revenue, as pointed out in the comptroller-general’s report.
“It’s a sad situation,” said Bains. “I hope the government pays attention.” Figures provided by TransLink for the period from Sept. 9 to Oct. 6 show average daily ridership of 83,027.
Hardie said “the ridership to date is a very positive development.” But he said it was “too early” to say how many of those riders are new to transit or how many cars were taken off the road as the result of the transit megaproject.
Back in March, Premier Gordon Campbell said: “This project is the equivalent of investing in a new 10-lane road between downtown Vancouver and Richmond. It will take 200,000 one-way trips off the streets.” However, the best Trans-Link could do to back that up was provide feedback from its customer-service polling of 200 adult Canada Line riders, who were more positive overall than other transit users.
The indication is that the line is attracting more car drivers because 79 per cent have access to a private vehicle for the trip compared with 66 per cent of riders overall. Three in 10, or 29 per cent, were not regular users of transit.
This video was on the news of late and it shows by metros should have a driver. Sadly if this were the ‘driverless’ SkyTrain, the results would have been tragic.
