QUESTION | How will businesses be affected by the No vote in the transportation plebiscite?
ED DES ROCHES | President, Plum Clothing Ltd.
Successful businesses adapt, and that is why I say failure of the plebiscite in Vancouver will bring no significant change for individual existing businesses in Vancouver.
Business owners wake up every morning knowing their decisions, even the smallest ones, will have an effect on their success.
If more people move to Vancouver because of better transit, competition will move with them and business will adapt. On the other hand, if people work and shop closer to home because getting in a car and going elsewhere is not worth it, then the cost of locations will increase because businesses will adapt.
Or if employees cannot easily get to work from outside the city, then wages will increase as will the cost to the consumer.
The real question concerns the growth of businesses in Vancouver and how that growth might be affected by persistently poor transit alternatives. Vancouver is a fantastic place to live and the residential demand is a development marketer’s dream. But where are people going to work?
One way or another, citizens pay for everything with what they earn.
Is the current plan to have people live in Vancouver and take transit to work outside of the city? Or, as is traditional, is the plan for people to live outside of Vancouver and take transit in to work? Or is it some combination of the two?
It seems to me that first we have to determine the economic plan before we determine our transit needs. Then we determine who is to benefit from the plan and, finally, how to have those that benefit pay for it.
GREG MOORE | Chairman, Metro Vancouver
Three weeks ago, we all heard the disappointing result of the transit and transportation plebiscite. That’s ancient history in our 24-7 news culture, and yet the future of our transportation system continues to be a hot topic in the media, online and in coffee shops throughout our region. For good reason.
Regardless of how you voted, how you felt about the plebiscite, or even how you feel about TransLink, one million more people are moving to Metro Vancouver over the next 30 years.
That’s about 500,000 more cars on our region’s streets and highways. The road and transit congestion we all experience daily will only get worse and worse.
If our transportation system doesn’t keep pace with our growing population, local businesses and the jobs and economic growth they generate will face increasing gridlock.
In other words, we’ll all pay the price of gridlock.
But I haven’t met very many business leaders who ignore problems that impede their success. They address challenges head on. That’s why the business community, labour, environmental groups and social agencies stood with the Mayors’ Council on Regional Transportation to champion transit improvements.
The B.C. government and the mayors need to work together over the next six months to find long-term sustainable solutions for the transportation challenges in our region. Now is the time we all must come together to find solutions and continue to develop a livable region that will meet our needs today and into the future. We can’t afford not to. And we need to get to it right away.
KEITH SASHAW | President, Association of Consulting Engineering Companies BC
The recent No vote in the transportation plebiscite will probably have no immediate effect on Vancouver’s business community, and for the most part in the short term it will be business as usual.
However, in the medium to long term, unless action is taken to implement the Mayors’ Council’s recommendations, business throughout the Lower Mainland will be affected and will have to start planning how they will deal with worsening traffic congestion and impaired mobility for their workers, clients and customers.
As we have already started to see, businesses will be looking to relocate operations close to convenient transit nodes, such as SkyTrain stations, in order to attract workers and customers. This will put upward pressure on the land values for such locations.
As congestion worsens, businesses will need to look at providing increasing flexibility in terms of hours of operation and business hours, and in fact some businesses may experience some difficulty in recruiting the workers they need.
Business involved in the transportation sector will need to factor in more time for deliveries as their trucks and vans will need to navigate increasingly congested roads. Business such as restaurants, construction companies and most retail operations rely on such shipments and will see increased costs and longer delivery times as a result.
The business community will also be watching to see what alternatives are suggested to raise the necessary funds. Needless to say, Lower Mainland businesses have a huge stake in policy-makers quickly finding an effective and fair method of paying for transportation options based on a user-pay model.
JON GARSON | Vice-president, B.C. Chamber of Commerce
While congestion will not increase overnight and businesses will continue to get their employees to work and goods to customers, we have set the stage for a big impact to businesses’ ability to grow and create jobs in the future.
While we will likely see a new Pattullo and rapid transit projects in Vancouver and Surrey, it is the nuts and bolts of the system that will suffer. No means we will see no expansion of the bus network and far less investment in the major road network. This will have very real impacts on business as we continue to see significant population growth placing ever more cars on the road while growth through the port will mean more trucks on the road.
This only leads to one outcome - congestion.
No new investment in our transit and transportation system will see the cost of congestion rise to $2 billion a year. This will mean lost productivity, slower economic growth, fewer jobs and higher costs.
More importantly, the no vote didn’t just kill a 0.5% sales tax increase, it has likely killed any possibility of significant new funding until we have another kick at the referendum can in 2018. All the talk of plan B’s ignore the reality that it has now become very difficult (perhaps even impossible) for government to increase funds after the public have send such a resounding no to new funding. Whether the public to say that or not is beside the point. What government will say, we heard your no to the sales tax but we will just use a different mechanism, and by the way we won’t ask you this time?
This is the biggest impact the no vote. A big impact indeed, when one thinks about it.
CHARLES GAUTHIER | CEO, Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association
As the economic engine of the region that relies on access by all modes of transportation, downtown Vancouver will certainly be negatively impacted by the ‘No’ result of the Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite.
Improvements that would have benefitted the downtown are now “on hold” or potentially may never materialize in our lifetime. These include the much needed upgrades to Expo, Millennium, and Canada Lines and, specifically, the 130 additional train cars needed to reduce overcrowding, meet demand and improve the transit experience; the 50% increase in SeaBus service; the 80% increase in the frequency and span of service on the existing NightBus network that would have benefitted the late night economy in our region; the construction of the Broadway subway corridor; and the maintenance and upgrade of major roadways that keep people and goods moving thereby reducing costly congestion.
The majority of Metro Vancouver voters who cast ballots in the plebiscite rejected the new regional sales tax of half-a-percent to help fund, in part, the Mayors Council’s $7.5 billion, ten-year plan to invest in these much needed transportation improvements.
But, they have no ability to halt the influx of one million more people into the region and the creation of an additional 600,000 jobs over the next 30 years. The “status quo” regarding our current transportation system is unacceptable now and will be woefully inadequate in the decades to come unless we invest in it.
Who or how we invest is the big unknown. What is known is that the risks of doing nothing will be costly to us all.
