What is with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) and its cheap shots at transit? The latest featured B.C. director Jordan Bateman calling the media to a gas station to announce “new figures showing that TransLink collects an average of $1,062 in taxes each year from every household in the Lower Mainland – and is considering adding another $595 per household through potential carbon (gas) taxes, vehicle levies, property tax and sales tax hikes.” Both these numbers are a crock.
Then, to add the requisite media sound bite, Bateman said the “widely reviled” TransLink, with its “bloated executive salaries … burns through our money and mayors want to give this pyromaniac even more matches.”
He positions himself as the champion of Ford Nation people fighting the elitist mayors “working away behind closed doors” because he wants to reduce the Lower Mainland's “ridiculously high cost of living” and presumably they don't. Please.
The million people and their 700,000 cars coming to this region will want to move around without choking in traffic jams. Existing buses, bridges and rapid transit lines aren't enough. Bateman's anti-transit ranting will lead to exactly the opposite of what he promises: higher costs for taxpayers.
Yes, TransLink is not as efficient as it should be. How bad is it? A 2012 provincial government audit found spending to be “reasonable,” and employee compensation to be “reasonable when compared to other organizations of similar size.” It identified a minimum $41 million in potential additional cost-saving and revenue-increasing efficiencies. (That would pay for less than half a kilometre of new rapid transit.) Since then, according to outside commissioner Robert Irwin after his most recent review, “They've tightened operations over the past few years. I don't think they're wasteful.”
What does the CTF know that he doesn't?
The average household in Metro Vancouver contributes just over $600 a year to TransLink, not $1,062. For that, TransLink runs a transportation network that produced an 84% increase in transit use in the region in the past decade. That's three times more transit trips per person than the second-ranked city our size in North America. That's the third-highest number of transit trips per person per year among all cities in North America, behind only New York and Toronto.
All those people on transit clear the roads for those who have to drive. One bus replaces 40 cars. One train replaces 1,000 cars. Transit is by far the cheapest choice for hard-pressed drivers stressed by TransLink's taxes (which, by the way, are only 10% of total household spending on transportation). Without some new funding, they won't have that choice.
The mayors are not looking for anywhere near an additional $595 per household. That's the sum of all the possible funding options, of which only one or two will be put forward.
If taxpayers follow Bateman's lead and turn down additional spending for transit, they'll pay far more somewhere else – “hundreds of millions of dollars more to … widen our roads and buy some extra land to pave more of our Metro Vancouver region in order to accommodate a growing population,” said Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart.
Transit is far less taxpayer-subsidized than cars. Each car costs taxpayers $2,876 more than drivers pay in fuel and other car-specific taxes – to cover accidents, road maintenance, health impacts, “free” parking and more. A transit rider costs other taxpayers $848.
If Jordan Bateman truly cared about taxpayers, he would be using his considerable communication skills to champion transit and TransLink.
