The recent announcement by B.C. Transportation Minister Mary Polak that a working group of regional mayors and senior provincial transportation staff, including the deputy minister, will sort out transit funding in Metro Vancouver is a welcome step forward.
I know, it’s three years after a memorandum of understanding was signed to do this, and its September 2014 due date will straddle a provincial election. Still, bringing provincial planners, TransLink planners, municipal planners and their elected bosses together is the only way to rationalize transit planning and funding.
Oh, right, TransLink planners don’t have elected bosses. More good news: revisiting that governance structure is also on the working group’s to-do list.
It always strikes me as odd that TransLink is held to a higher level of public accountability than the other big transportation spenders: the Ministry of Transportation, Port Metro Vancouver, BC Ferries and the Vancouver Airport Authority. The airport authority, like TransLink and BC Ferries, also has the authority to levy taxes (airport improvement fees), yet its board has a majority of appointed members. The port is pushing for the replacement of the Massey Tunnel to deepen the Fraser River, at a cost to the taxpayers of unknown hundred of millions of dollars, yet it answers only to an appointed board.
Finally, the biggest transportation spender in the region, the provincial Ministry of Transportation, currently overseeing $21 billion of expanded ports, rail lines, roads and airports across the province, takes direction from the Pacific Gateway Alliance, made up entirely of unelected bodies: Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, BNSF Railway, Port Metro Vancouver, the Prince Rupert Port Authority, Vancouver International Airport and TransLink.
It sails on, unfettered by the talk-show taunts and special audits TransLink keeps getting dragged through.
Transit is an orphan, sitting beside the road begging for new taxes while road, bridge, tunnel, rail and airport builders go straight to the provincial and federal treasuries and get what they need out of existing revenue.
Approvals for big new highway projects just keep rolling on, with public consultation limited to whether the new crossing should be a bridge or a tunnel. The big decision – committing to a multibillion-dollar replacement –is made out of the public eye by unelected boards with the provincial cabinet’s blessing.
TransLink doesn’t get that blessing. Its original governance model was widely lauded and copied because it combined (some) road, (some) bridge and transit planning with regional land use planning. Hopefully these common causes will be reunited when its governance is overhauled by the minister’s new working group.
But we should go the next step: unite all the proposed major transportation projects for the region and rank them by some agreed-upon criteria.
But wait! TransLink already has goals for the region’s transportation for 2040, sanctioned by elected officials: reduce GHGs; make most trips by transit, walking and cycling; match jobs and housing density with frequent transit; make travelling safe, secure and accessible; grow the economy and keep goods moving; use stable funding that influences transportation choices. Does a new Highway 99 bridge through farmland over the Fraser, in the most density-averse municipality in the region, opening up agriculture land for new development, meet those goals?
Elected officials should be deciding that, out in the open, in the context of all the other transportation projects clamouring for funding. •
