According to light-rail advocate Malcolm Johnston, any transit authority that encourages people to do anything but take transit in the age of high gas prices is “incompetent”.

What has the Delta-based Light Rail Committee cofounder fuming is a series of TransLink ads on transit vehicles that encourage people to carpool, telecommute, and cycle. The ads encourage the use of a ride-share project-the Jack Bell Foundation program-but are not encouraging people to use transit.

“What transit organization would do such a thing?” Johnston asked in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight. “It is the job of the transit authority to provide the transit capacity needed to deal with the routes. And if they cannot do that, they are incompetent.”

Bus Riders Union organizer Jen Efting told the Straight she found the ads “very revealing about what TransLink’s true priorities are”.

“If they had public health as a priority or social justice or even the environment first, they would be concerned about ridership,” Efting said. “But, really, it seems the issue is more about being able to generate revenue for their private partners rather than actually making sure that the people of this region have healthy air to breathe and have access to transit when they need it.”

Efting, seated in a coffee shop at Commercial Drive and Broadway during afternoon rush hour, said the ads do not make sense “if you are thinking about transit in terms of a public service”.

“It is a public service, but the way TransLink is running it, it is more like a business,” she said. “Every time somebody takes the bus, it does cost them [TransLink] more money when you look at it in very crude terms. But if we look at it in a holistic way-in terms of what it does for the region to have a car pulled off the road, what it does for the health of our region to help the poor people get around-then it comes out that if people ride the bus it is better for everybody. It [recent advertising] is very frustrating, but it is kind of a rare moment of honesty from the TransLink board.”

TransLink spokesperson Ken Hardie said to imagine a store owner.

“Picture yourself running a department store and you have a very popular item in stock,” Hardie said by phone. “Would you go out and advertise heavily for people to come and buy the item when you don’t have enough of it to sell? This is the issue that we have found ourselves in on many of the transit lines. The capacity is limited and we have had to be very careful about generating demand for a product that we could not fulfill.”

TransLink’s total fuel-tax revenue for 2006 and 2007 was $531.9 million; the gas-based monies accounted for-on an average annual basis for those two years-30.2 percent of total revenue.

The Straight suggested that TransLink not providing opportunity for ridership to grow amounted to window-dressing.

“It’s not window-dressing when we are providing 300 million rides a year,” Hardie said. “What we have in the region is a growing population and an economy that has been driving far more trips per day.”

TransLink board chair Dale Parker told the Straight that single-occupancy vehicles are part of the equation.

“While using transit is great, we do recognize there are periods during rush hour when the routes are clogged,” Parker said. “One of the solutions, of course, is that people couple up on cars, carpool, and are cycling and using other forms of transit.”

Both Efting and Johnston lay the overall blame at the door of B.C. transportation minister Kevin Falcon, in large part due to Falcon’s commitment to expensive metro rail. However, in a Straight interview last November, Falcon was unrepentant about the $2.4-billion Canada Line: “If people are going to blame us for putting a package that brought over $1 billion into transit for Vancouver, that was not in TransLink’s plan and was not there before-the premier brought together federal dollars, provincial dollars, and airport-authority dollars-and if that is a negative then I will take that with great pride.”

Is TransLink suppressing ridership?

Dale Parker
TransLink board chair

“The short answer is ‘No’.…I think that is more directed toward the fact that there are periods in the rush hours when it is at peak capacity. To encourage more ridership at a time when the roads are clogged with people, driving one person in a vehicle is probably not the most productive way of facilitating people getting around.”

Cheeying Ho
Executive director, Smart Growth B.C.

“I think TransLink needs to build more capacity in order to better encourage ridership.…I’m not sure what they can do with SkyTrain. I don’t know if the technology allows them to expand it. There needs to be more attention paid south of the Fraser River to really increase the latent [ridership] demand there.”

Derek Corrigan
Mayor of Burnaby

“I think that TransLink is having a real problem in being able to service the ridership that has flocked to transit over the increased gas prices and good initiatives such as the U-Pass, which has really created much higher riderships. They have garnered the benefits but they have not had the capacity to be able to deliver the service.”

Suzanne Anton
NPA councillor and former director of TransLink

“The answer has to be ‘No.’ No matter how much I dislike the current structure, I assume the people involved in it are decent people.…[but] one of the things I was urging TransLink to do in the short time I had left [as director] was to advertise [transit] more.”