I’ve had some wonderful bosses over the years, but never two dozen of them at once. I have a feeling that would wear on me, even if they were the best of the bunch. I suspect you’d feel the same.
Yet the CEO of TransLink, Kevin Desmond, finds himself in the wide web of mayoral masters in Metro Vancouver, at the ultimate economic behest of senior governments and accountable to the rider bound to be grumpier as the unsettling weather greets the daily grind.
Unless he’s devoid of emotion – and he sprightly appears anything but – this girth of governance can’t help but grate.
He nevertheless cheerily brought his basket of issues and ideas last week to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, and while he had more of an opportunity to shed light and win allies than he seized, he afforded the capacity audience an understanding of the minor-to-mammoth plate-spinning he performs.
The big problem, really, is all of us. We are too many for the transit we have. Our regional population will grow by 1.2 million in the next three decades, barring some kind of ugly pushback as a city that does not want more. We ought to generate a half-million jobs in that stretch, which sounds nice, until you conclude the ridership of TransLink will double along the way, which doesn’t entirely sound nice if we don’t get ready.
Is TransLink ready? Nope.
Communities are planning differently, the regional mayors can barely agree if the sun rises in the east, and Desmond finds himself in the clutches of their 10-year vision that appears to have taken 20 years to devise, interpret and implement.
His own 30-year plan isn’t terribly fashion-forward, either, so he’s about to launch what he cleverly characterized – at least for those of us of a certain age – as the path from The Flintstones to The Jetsons. His consultation plan feels the most open of any process I can recollect in our midst to usher us into a world of smartphone transactions, on-demand micro-transit, but not quite the Star Trek transporter.
Meantime, there are some smart short-term remedies en route: extra buses (double-deckers even, non-diesel eventually), more routes with greater service, a scheme for business-focused commuter pooling and an imminent deal to modernize the gawd-awful Pattullo Bridge.
There is one unresolved remedy some distance away: a Vancouver subway along Broadway from VCC to Arbutus, whose planning has been a decade in the making, whose budget has been years without an update and whose regional financing has not been devised.
It begs the question: which other project in memory proceeded this way?
Even in the absence of transparency that might win over the doubters, even if there might be above-ground options to address much of the mess of the really-gawd-awful B-Line sooner and cheaper, even if his executive history in Seattle was tilted toward simpler and more elegant solutions, Desmond seems determined to keep on keeping on with his masters’ megaplan.
The largest question mark of all is the source of local financing. Unless the crews strike a gusher of valuable crude as they drill to extend the Millennium Line – and the mayor would probably block it from coming to market – the taxpayer is in for a revolting revolution on how we finance expansion of what we dearly need. This will be medicine with no spoon of sugar to help it go down.
It will serve as another layer of taxation, in effect, and likely tie itself proportionately to how, where and when we commute. To wit: there may not be bridge tolls, per se, but tolls for coming over a bridge. It may make you want to work the midnight shift or establish a home office. It will be interesting to see if it alters the existing carbon taxes at the pumps. The fees will be in part payable in advance and in large measure payable in perpetuity.
The task to devise the mobility pricing formula rests with Allan Seckel and Joy McPhail – not quite two more bosses for Desmond, but arguably his greatest influencers in the near term with the greatest capacity to shape his destiny.
His next board of trade update ought to be a doozy – if you’re not of a certain age, by the way, that’s a term that once described a car.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
