Opinion: Canada Line debacle a cautionary tale for a return of TransLink's elected board

Feb 3 2022, 10:40 pm

Two city councillors in Vancouver are making the case that their municipal jurisdiction should have more influence on the decisions made by TransLink through its board of directors.

Green Party councillor Pete Fry and COPE councillor Jean Swanson want the governance structure of TransLink’s board of directors reconfigured to allow for a majority of its members to be comprised of locally elected officials — mayors and councillors of municipal governments across Metro Vancouver.

Currently, the 11-member board is comprised of two seats for Metro Vancouver mayors, and nine members who are not politicians.

The two mayors who sit on the board are selected by TransLink’s separate 23-member Mayors’ Council, with the region’s mayors electing a chair and vice chair for their group each year. These positions are held by New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Cote and Langley Township Mayor Jack Froese, respectively.

The nine non-elected members are appointed and have six-year term limits. They are generally local industry leaders with professional experience in engineering, transportation, urban planning, land use, business, finance, and legal.

Fry and Swanson want to reduce the number of non-elected members, replacing them with local, municipally elected officials, with these positions allocated based on “populations, ridership, and transit infrastructure present, and potential of member cities with consideration of urban, suburban, and rural representation.” Essentially, they are calling for the return of the municipally elected board of directors that governed TransLink prior to 2008.

Their member motion, scheduled to be considered by Vancouver City Council next week, calls on Mayor Kennedy Stewart to write a letter to the provincial government to ask them to change the legislation that governs TransLink, with specific attention to the makeup of its board of directors.

In their motion, the councillors argued that Vancouver City Council “represents the municipal population with the highest transit use in the region, with 50% of transit riders,” and suggested that this would help the City of Vancouver achieve its own goals relating to climate action.

“Representation from the City of Vancouver and other cities within Metro Vancouver on the TransLink Board would open the door for more local initiatives to increase accessibility and affordability of transit for our communities, which would make it easier to meet our climate goals,” reads the motion.

Fry and Swanson note they are echoing a request made by the Mayors’ Council during the October 2020 provincial election, when the body asked the provincial parties to develop a new governance model for TransLink that puts decision-making powers back into the hands of municipally elected officials.

Presently, the board of directors manages and provides oversight on the public transit authority’s operations and its leadership, while the Mayors’ Council sets the direction on investments and longer term strategies.

TransLink’s elected board played a major role in Canada Line’s shortcomings

But let’s give this some much-needed additional context.

TransLink was first established in 1998 after Metro Vancouver’s public transit system broke away from the BC Transit umbrella.

Throughout its first decade, TransLink was governed by a board of directors comprised of 12 mayors and councillors from across the region. The Mayors’ Council, another body that oversees TransLink today, did not exist at this time.

The panel of mayors and councillors failed their first major test when they rejected building the Canada Line — then known as the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver (RAV) Line — not once, but twice in under a year. It took a third vote attempt in 2004 for the project to be finally approved, but only with the stipulation that private contractor bids must come within a $1.35 billion budget, which ultimately was not achievable.

Technical considerations over the project were highly politicized, with opponents on the board doubting the ridership projections. They deemed the ridership figures to be unrealistically high, and had concerns that it would be a major drain on TransLink’s finances over the long term, leading to high property tax and fare hikes, and cuts to bus services across the region.

There was also a notion that existing buses would be sufficient, dismissing the exponentially greater potential of SkyTrain — its features of speed, frequency, and reliability — over the 98 B-Line that operated from downtown Vancouver to Richmond via Granville Street.

Here are a few examples of what was said at the time:

  • “I’ve been trying to kill this blood-sucking vampire for some time. I think there will be a tax revolt when people realize how much this is going to cost them. You and your children’s children will be paying for this project for decades,” Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan said to a crowd during the final meeting in 2004, emphasizing that 100,000 riders per day is unrealistic, according to the Vancouver Sun.
  • “There is no rational reason why we should risk the entire public-transit system – 80% of which is buses – on an expenditure where there is dubious assurance that the ridership will arrive,” Vancouver City Councillor David Cadman told the Straight in 2004.
  • “If people were going to move in those numbers, you would have seen them on the 98 B-Line,” Pitt Meadows Mayor Don MacLean told the Straight in 2004. “It didn’t happen.”

Some board directors were also unfamiliar with the public-private partnership model imposed on the project by the provincial government, and disagreed with the approach.

But there were also other driving motives for the mayors of Burnaby, Coquitlam, and Pitt Meadows, who wanted the lower ridership potential Evergreen Line serving their communities prioritized for implementation over the Canada Line. That same year, the board of directors approved the planning of the Evergreen Line as a street-level light rail transit (LRT) system.

Opposition to the project over its costs and impacts, and skepticism over its ridership potential forced project planners to perform extreme value engineering measures on the Canada Line’s design to reduce construction costs further. At one point late in the planning process, additional single tracking for the elevated guideway between Aberdeen Station and Lansdowne Station was even seriously considered to reduce cost, and address Richmond City Council’s aesthetic impact concerns.

The lengthy infighting within TransLink’s board of directors also shrunk the available construction timeline window that could have otherwise been spent on building a better, higher quality system before the Olympic deadline. The delays in awarding a contract and starting construction also led to higher costs from inflation.

Needless to say, the Canada Line is, of course, an immense success, and it even exceeded its “unrealistic” ridership projections by years soon after opening.

BC government reshapes TransLink’s governance

In the aftermath of the Canada Line debacle, the provincial government, in 2007, abolished the elected board of directors of TransLink, and created the first iteration of the Mayors’ Council, which at the time carried an advisory role, and was given the authority to appoint the new role of regional transportation commissioner.

TransLink’s new board of directors would instead be comprised of professional experts, and the provincial government would also have a much greater role in setting the direction of the region’s transportation expansion plans.

At the time, BC Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Kevin Falcon called TransLink’s elected board of directors “dysfunctional” and asserted the municipal politicians that made up the old board were unable to put the region as a whole first before their own municipalities.

“There was too much focus on local backyard politics, as opposed to the ability to think about the broader regional interest,” said Falcon in 2006.

“There’s no ability there to develop the skill-set to understand major, multi-billion projects. And I think that’s part of what undercuts the public confidence in the decisions that are being made.”

With the provincial government playing a far larger role overseeing TransLink’s direction, it made three major moves within the first few years of the shakeup.

After completing a new analysis, the provincial government in 2008 cancelled the old board of directors’ plans to build the Evergreen Line as LRT. Instead, it would become a continuous SkyTrain extension of the Millennium Line, as originally planned in the late 1990s. The provincial analysis found only a $150 million construction cost difference between LRT and SkyTrain, yet the benefits and ridership potential of SkyTrain were far higher than LRT for speed, frequency, reliability, and a seamless one-train ride requiring no transfers for Millennium Line passengers.

That same year, the provincial government released a comprehensive $10.3-billion Provincial Transit Plan that included not only the SkyTrain Evergreen Extension, but also the full SkyTrain extension to UBC and a complete overhaul of the Expo Line. A $1.3-billion investment would be made on the Expo Line to renovate stations, extend platforms to accommodate six-car trains, upgrade control systems, and extend the line by six kilometres from King George Station to Fleetwood. The plan also incorporated seven new additional rapid bus routes across the region.

The implementation of fare gates and a smart card fare collection system, known as Compass, were also a provincial directive made around the same time, aligning TransLink’s system with modern Asian and European networks.

The governance that exists today under the Mayors’ Council

A change in the province’s political leadership accompanied with continued pressure from the Mayors’ Council to provide the body with more decision-making authority eventually led to some adjustments to the 2008 framework.

In 2014, the provincial government eliminated the position of the regional transportation commissioner, and instead handed its responsibilities to the Mayors’ Council. This includes providing the Mayors’ Council with authority over fare increases, the sale of major assets, and overseeing TransLink complaints and customer satisfaction.

It also provided the Mayors’ Council with the powers to approve TransLink’s long-term strategies, including 10-year investment plans and 30-year regional transportation strategies. The reforms also introduced a regional transportation funding referendum requirement, which has since been removed.

It was from these reforms that the Mayors’ Council created its first 10-year vision for improving the public transit system, which included the major projects of the Millennium Line Broadway Extension to Arbutus, and the now-cancelled Surrey Newton-Guildford (SNG) LRT.

The Mayors’ Council already has considerable influence over who sits on TransLink’s board of directors. It appoints seven of the 11 directors, based on a shortlist made by a screening panel. Another two seats on the board are filled by the Mayors’ Council’s chair and vice chair, and the remaining two seats are appointed by the provincial government.

The changes established in 2014/2015 achieved a better balance between local representation and accountability, and ensuring decisions are made with a wholistic regional and technical merit lens, effectively rewinding some of the “overcorrections” following the Canada Line debacle. The Mayors’ Council provides checks and balances on the TransLink board, and vice versa.

That leads to the question of whether the regional infighting over the Canada Line and Evergreen Extension should define TransLink’s old board of directors, and be an example of the potential outcomes of bringing back this governance model when local politicians are left to their own devices.

To their credit, throughout much of the 2010s, under the Mayors’ Council, the elected members have shown they are able to cooperate and compromise, and to better ensure regional transportation expansion plan benefits are more spread out. The municipal governments of Vancouver and Surrey, through their mayors, have also worked together for mutual benefit to ensure regional projects that directly benefit their major jurisdictions are prioritized in investment plans — namely the Millennium Line extension to Arbutus and SNG LRT by the previous mayors, and the UBC extension from Arbutus and the Expo Line’s Surrey-Langley extension by the current mayors.

Fry and Swanson, in their motion, also suggested the City of Vancouver does not have enough influence over TransLink.

But under the weighted vote system for key decisions made by the Mayors’ Council, Vancouver through Mayor Kennedy Stewart holds 32 of the 134 weighted votes or 24%. This is followed by Surrey with 26 weighted votes (19.4%), Burnaby with 12 votes (9%), Richmond with 10 votes (7.5%), and Coquitlam with seven votes (5%). All jurisdictions get at least one vote for basic representation, with additional weighted votes based on their jurisdiction’s population. One additional weighted vote is given for every 20,000 residents in a municipality.

Naturally, Vancouver’s influence will shrink over time, as its slower population growth will account for a smaller proportion of Metro Vancouver’s overall population. This diminishing influence is the regional political trade-off of Vancouver’s very own decision to not allow more residential and commercial growth within its own boundaries, instead sending growth to Burnaby’s town centres anchored around SkyTrain stations, and Surrey, Langley, and Coquitlam. In the process, Vancouver is increasingly shedding its once dominating regional influence to the suburban cities.

And finally, that leads to the question of what kind of role professional experts should play in making highly technical decisions, which are currently grounded by TransLink’s board, with recommendations made by TransLink staff.

The Canada Line outcome is just one example when political leadership is charged with making technical decisions with mainly a political lens.

In Ottawa, public backlash over the crippling glitches with the new Confederation Line contributed to Mayor Jim Watson’s recent decision to not run for re-election. Ottawa’s public transit authority is an agency owned by the City of Ottawa, and governed by Ottawa City Council.

The $2.1-billion Confederation Line opened in September 2019 as a fully-grade separated system similar to SkyTrain, but its trains are manned with drivers, and it uses low-floor LRT trains. Over the past two years since opening, the system has faced numerous hours-long service disruptions from train breakdowns and poor equipment reliability, and even multiple train derailments, including a major derailment in September 2021 that led to the complete shutdown of the line for almost two months. Mechanical parts of the cars on the Confederation Line have been falling off while the trains are in operation, and as it turns out the trains are not very compatible with Ottawa’s extreme winters.

Ottawa’s expensive reliability problems with the Confederation Line, now and likely well into the future, are grounded on a decision made by its elected political leaders a decade ago that chose an “untested” LRT combination with automatic signalling, over the strong recommendation of their consultants and professional experts to go with a light metro rail system — similar to SkyTrain.

In essence, Ottawa’s mayor and city councillors literally bought their city the wrong model of train.

Kenneth ChanKenneth Chan

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