Opinion: Are we about to cut public transit services in Vancouver? | Daily Hive

Opinion: Are we really about to cut public transit services in Metro Vancouver?

TransLink double-decker bus. (TransLink)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Denis Agar, who is the executive director of Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders, a non-profit organization that’s pushing for faster, more reliable, more abundant public transit across the region.

You probably already know why public transit is important: it’s a lifeline for the more than 30 per cent of society who can’t get a driver’s licence, it costs 90 per cent less than owning a car for families that desperately need to save, and it radically reduces congestion

What you may not know is how unusually reliant we are on public transit. A Metro Vancouver resident uses public transit at four times the rate of someone from Seattle. One million of us are on the system at least once a week — about a third of the region’s population.

Imagine the traffic mayhem if our public transit usage dropped to Seattle levels. Imagine the impacts on ambulances, trucking, and our collective well-being.

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Whatever opinion you may have on the quality of life in Metro Vancouver, there are 1,700 buses, 450 train cars, and four ferries on the TransLink system that keep it from being far, far worse. And you know who will bear the brunt of the damage if any one of those vehicles are taken out of service: people with disabilities, seniors, youth, and people that can’t afford a car.

So, why is public transit always on the chopping block? Some readers may remember Premier Christy Clark’s public transit referendum in 2015, designed to shield the province from accountability for either a positive or a negative outcome.

We’re in a similar situation today, where the challenge of public transit funding is seen as a burden to be offloaded. If new funding isn’t found to sustain TransLink’s operations by April 2025, we could be facing a 50 per cent cut in bus service and a 30 per cent cut in rail service. Some neighbourhoods would be left without a single bus route, and crowding would go from being intolerably bad today to embarrassingly bad in 2026.

Any level of government — provincial, federal, or municipal — could decide to provide funding to keep our region from a public transit catastrophe. Alternatively, the province could give TransLink new ways of raising money. But to make progress on any of these fronts, we need to find elected officials who are willing to stop finger-pointing and say to public transit riders, “I’m not going to let you down.”

I run a non-profit that’s urgently trying to amplify the voices of the one million public transit riders and bring about the public transit network we all deserve. We’re putting out an open call for elected officials who choose to see public transit not as a burden but as a ticket to popularity and praise.

Doug Ford investing 2x as much per capita in new public transit as David Eby

Public transit is immensely popular.

A recent Leger poll indicated 81 per cent of Canadians support expanded public transit. Our polling indicates that support for expanded public transit doesn’t vary significantly between public transit riders and motorists.

And public transit has been winning elections in all kinds of places — Nashville, Columbus, and most recently Ontario, where candidates were one-upping each other with grander and grander public transit plans. Even before Ontario’s election, conservative populist Premier Doug Ford was investing twice as much per capita in public transit construction as B.C. Premier David Eby.

When we bring riders up to speed on the funding situation, we need to start by making a distinction between operating funding and capital funding.

Capital funding is generally a one-time injection to build a new SkyTrain or buy a bus. It’s easier to get from the government because it involves a ribbon cutting and doesn’t set up an ongoing commitment.

Operating funding pays for the cost of fuel, labour, and maintenance. TransLink’s current $600-million annual budget hole is an operating deficit.

As an example, Mike Farnworth, the B.C. minister of transportation and public transit, was in town last week to formally announce the official start of construction on the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension, but TransLink currently doesn’t know where it will find funding to operate the new service once it’s complete. If the status quo holds, 30% of the trains on the track today will need to be parked by 2026.

Depending on where you live in Metro Vancouver, you may have already started experiencing the public transit cuts. Some of our most vital, diverse, compelling urban streets are seeing record-low public transit service.

In 2019, the No. 8 bus on Fraser Street in Vancouver was scheduled to come every seven minutes during the afternoon rush. Whether you were heading to John Oliver Secondary School, No Frills, or Dhaliwal Sweets, that’s the kind of high-frequency service that allows you to glide up and down Fraser Street without referring to the schedule.

That’s the kind of service we should aspire to, if we believe that everyone should have the freedom to explore the region regardless of income or ability.

During the pandemic, TransLink was able to roughly keep public transit service levels the same, thanks to operating funding provided by the late Premier John Horgan and Premier Eby. This funding saved us from the devastating cuts that other cities and regions are still trying to dig out from.

Risk of public transit “death spiral” in Metro Vancouver

One important thing to know about public transit is that riders react remarkably quickly to reductions in public transit service. This quickly turns into a ridership “death spiral” where reduced service causes longer waits, which drives people away and makes it much harder to justify the cost of service increases to the public.

This death spiral hit some public transit agencies, like San Francisco. But in 2021 and 2022, we had a different problem: overcrowding and pass-ups on certain routes were hitting unprecedented levels. Bus routes like the No. 323, on 128 Street in Surrey, and the No. 640, serving the Tilbury industrial park in Delta, were leaving people behind daily.

So, without the ability to add more buses, TransLink set forth a plan to shuffle buses from slightly less crowded routes to intolerably overcrowded routes. As a result, the No. 8 on Fraser Street went from seven-minute frequencies down to 15 minutes. And the No. 323 on 128 Street went from a 12-minute frequency up to seven minutes. The No. 323 also received the longer 120-person capacity articulated buses because frequency increases alone wouldn’t do the trick.

Riders have responded to both of those changes in exactly the ways that you’d imagine: way down on the No. 8 and way up on the No. 323.

So, if our elected officials allow even more cuts to occur, the response from riders can be easily predicted.

The ones who can afford to spend $15,000 per year on a car will go out and drive, clogging up the roads and grinding the gears of industry to a halt. The ones who can’t afford a car or can’t get a driver’s licence will have to bum rides or simply stop going places: stop going to work, school, the doctor, or to see friends and family.

TransLink has estimated the gazillion-dollar impact of these cuts, but do you really need to see the impact quantified as a percentage of our GDP? Or do you understand, in the core of your being, the impact of being cut off from the places and people that matter to you?

“SORRY BUS FULL” will be far more common

Movement is agnostic about who should fund public transit. Whoever shows up with the cash will be roundly praised. I suppose that in a perfect world, all three levels of government would be tripping over themselves to court public transit riders and share the cost burden equally.

Since our capacity as an advocacy group is limited, we are focusing our efforts on getting public transit riders to speak up directly to their MLAs, because they seem to be the most crucial piece of a funding mix: they have powers to enable new revenue streams that other levels of government don’t have. We also saw during the recent provincial election that the B.C. Conservatives promised to bail out TransLink for two years, and we are hoping that the province will beat that.

The most crucial piece to understand here is that the current state of transit is already letting people down.

A simple bailout to sustain 2020 service levels into 2026 should clearly be seen as an abrogation of duty.

Too many people are seeing “SORRY BUS FULL” as they get left behind at the stop.

Too many people are forced to figure out how they’re going to do the night shift when their bus home ends at 11 p.m.

And too many people are forced to choose between impossibly long commutes and impossibly high rents in a region where it feels like the deck is stacked against the working class.

Instead of fighting this rearguard action, we wish we could focus on how to make public transit better. In the long term, we need to think big and fill in the big gaps in our public transit network. Major SkyTrain expansions would be extremely well used on day one, and we don’t even have a regional rail network, nor a provincial intercity bus agency.

In the short term, simply adding buses and bus lanes would transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of voters in swing ridings.

Who will step up and be our hero? It might be your MLA. Please reach out to them. You can use our website to do so, but calls, texts, and personal e-mails are better. If you have a pre-existing relationship with them, your outreach counts for even more.

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