Trouble In Paradise
When TransLink’s mouthpiece, the Hive prints negative stories about SkyTrain tells me that things are very bad.
When your best friends are giving you the ‘raspberry’, maybe it’s time to do things differently.
“Terrible lately”: Vancouver transit riders react to disruption frequency
Amir Ali|Apr 12 2024
Daily Hive
Some Vancouver transit riders are alleging an increase in disruptions to TransLink service.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen a few periods of frequent incidents, whether police or medical, impacting thousands and bringing service to a halt.
In February, Daily Hive Urbanized reported at least eight incidents on SkyTrain over three weeks, resulting in disruptive shutdowns.
Many shared their concerns and frustration in a Reddit thread on Thursday in response to another disruption limiting service between Braid and Lougheed. We’ve also received comment from TransLink about the concerns, which come just months before transit fares will be increased, impacting all fare zones.
There are a lot of folks who are traveling from the Lougheed area who are impacted by some service changes.
“The whole Expo Line service reduction for the new rail yard near Braid has been brutal. I feel like there must have been a better way to branch a track without a two-year-long service disruption,” one user said via the Reddit thread.
Another user said, “SkyTrain’s been terrible lately.”
Some have elected to switch to using rideshare services.
“I’m literally in an Uber right now ’cause I ain’t dealing with that s**t.”
Drivers or people using other means to commute offer their condolences to Metro Vancouver transit riders.
“I feel for anyone that has to rely on SkyTrain to get to work. Absolutely ridiculous the number of outages that have been happening lately, I seem to get an alert every day, sometimes multiple a day.”
Some sound more forgiving, comparing SkyTrain service to other transit systems in North America.
This is what you get with P3 arrangements. Is the operator of the Expo Line a private engineering firm which built the Expo Line and one of the P3 financiers? If so, indications are that the operator ran the Expo Line into the ground to avoid costly maintenance and earn extra profits.
Regional transit is a scam and caters to the very small number of commuters who travel extreme distances. This enriches politicians who spend on regional transit for cronies or for companies that they have an interest in. Get out of the mega-billion regional transit nonsense and into the low cost streetcar transit serving the majority of commuters making short distances. Whoever engineered (using the term loosely) regional transit did Vancouver a gross disservice and must to be investigated.
The problem is, how short a distance do you want to serve? In Vancouver the average distance traveled by Translink passengers (mean not median) is over 8.8 km or almost 5.5 miles (for non metric inclined). Going that distance on slow local transit is a recipe for losing a lot of passengers. My point is @Professor+Kay, even with “relatively cheap” surface LRT or BRT, cheap anyway compared to Skytrain lines to outer suburbs, something the Skytrain really wasn’t designed to do. With surface LRT or BRT you still have to spend a billion or so to get a good network effect to even start to occur. That network effect is what really builds up ridership with surface rapid transit systems. It’s never going to be cheap.
My main beef, with Translink is that its Skytrain or nothing. The high cost of building and the ever growing operating cost of the technology itself has proven outer areas of Vancouver need another form of rapid transit. EMU’S or DMU’S running on mainline railways can easily replicate LRT or Skytrain like service, using vehicles that are actually designed to handle that distance traveled. Whereas the Skytrain technology simply doesn’t do longer or even semi-regional distances well at all, trips like Langley to anywhere in the central part of the region, not just downtown are beyond what the technology was designed to do. Add in that, right now, every penny should be spent on upgrading the existing Skytrain lines (they are ageing rapidly and recent maintenance issues prove that) not building suicidally expensive Skytrain extensions handling low passenger levels that could easily and more importantly, be cheaply handled by other rapid transit options.
The cost of putting SkyTrain in a tunnel (last estimate) along Broadway is $500M per kilometre. That’s HALF A BILLION DOLLARS.
The cost of TWO kilometres alone would fund the restoration of some strategic former streetcar lines, and some new bits to fill gaps where SkyTrain will never be built. Surrey in particular would benefit from surface rail LRT / Streetcars, with its rapidly growing population and problematic distances between many small common communities. Surrey City engineers have a sensible plan for this on the books, but it was derailed by Mayor Doug McCallum’s self-serving decision to build yet more SkyTrain as his own vanity project.
If the day ever comes when Mayor Locke stops obsessing about policing, she would be doing her restive constituents a great favour by moving the local LRT project rapidly along.
Zwei replies: I find it interesting that a transit mode designed to mitigate the high cost of subway construction is being built as a subway!